


OMNISCIENT

by acareeroutofrobbingbanks



Series: The High Way to Hell [9]
Category: Fall Out Boy, Panic! at the Disco
Genre: F/M, Folklore, Gen, M/M, Monsters, Mythology - Freeform, but I'm careful now, the high way to hell verse, underage warning is just for fantasies
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-25
Updated: 2018-11-16
Packaged: 2019-02-06 11:32:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 6
Words: 25,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12816615
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/acareeroutofrobbingbanks/pseuds/acareeroutofrobbingbanks
Summary: Ryan Ross could see the future. He could also see the past and present, but people never seemed to care about that part.As the one and only Oracle, Ryan Ross has a lot on his plate. He has to deal with frantic rock stars, violent nightmares, visions that rip him out of his ordinary life, and on top of all that, homework.But when one day at school Ryan is confronted with a horrible vision of the school priest getting murdered, Ryan is thrown from prophesying adventures from the sidelines to the middle of the action. And this all is made even more complicated by the sudden appearance of a boy he has been dreaming about for nearly half his life. Ryan never saw himself as a hero. But with the help of the new boy with the dorky haircut and impossible powers, anything can happen.(Set in the same universe as The High Way to Hell, but can be read separately.)





	1. Prologue

“God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent. Can anyone tell me what that means?”

Religion class was a bore, but it was the one class that the fourth and fifth graders at Bishop Gorman shared, so it was Ryan's favorite, all because Spencer was there.

“What's Green Day been up to?” Spencer whispered out of the side of his mouth while Mrs. Layden looked around for prey to call on.

“Loch Ness,” Ryan mouthed, and Spencer's eyes widened.

“The Loch Ness-!”

“Mr. Smith, since you're feeling so chatty. Can you tell us what one of those words mean?”

Spencer blanched, and Ryan held back a fit of laughter. He felt bad for Spencer, but mostly he was relieved that he hadn’t been called on.

“No, Mrs. Layden,” Spencer said. He focused his eyes on the top of his desk. Ryan was about to relax, when-

“How about you, Mr. Ross?”

Well, shit.

“Um,” Ryan said. His tie suddenly felt very tight around his throat. _He knew this, he knew this, he knew this_. “Um, yeah, omni means all, right? And, um, isn’t ‘omniscient’ all-knowing?”

“Correct, Ryan. Omniscient means _all-knowing_. God knows everything. He knows every thought you have and sees every deed you do. Go on, write this down. And don’t let me catch you boys talking during class again. Now, omnipotent means all-powerful…”

She droned on, but now that he was in the clear, Ryan slumped back against his chair. His dad had overslept again, and he hadn’t had time for breakfast this morning, so he was really looking forward to lunch and recess, where, if he had the time and no one else felt like picking on him and Spencer, he might check in on Green Day again. They weren’t in trouble, the last he saw, but things changed so fast in monster fighting, and Ryan couldn’t believe he had to sit through his usual dull classes while all of his favorite bands were out saving the world.

Well, not Blink 182, for some reason. But it was still fun watching them. They got into all kinds of shit without any magical help.

Ryan's train of thought was broken off when a tiny piece of paper landed on his desk with a soft thud. Ryan unfolded it to reveal a message written in Spencer's messy, blocky handwriting:

_Didn't know you were god_

Ryan shoved the note deep into his pocket, suddenly nervous. It was one thing to joke around like that outside of school, but blasphemy was the kind of thing that got you more than detention.

And something else about the note bugged him, something Ryan couldn't put his finger on. Comparing him to God. Omniscient. It made him feel hot and clammy at the same time. He put pencil to paper and then set it back down a half dozen times or more before finally giving up and tossing the crumpled note into his desk.

Spencer turned around and cocked his head in question. Ryan gestured towards the teacher in the hopes that Spencer would think he just didn't want to get in trouble.

Omniscient, Ryan thought. It sounded much cooler on paper than it actually was in practice.

***

Ryan bade Spencer goodbye at the bus stop and made his way home alone. Often the two would hang out after school, but Ryan was exhausted and his dad was working late, so today would be the perfect day to just relax by himself. Juicy Juice, a couple episodes of Fresh Prince, and an afternoon of solitude seemed to Ryan to cure all ailments, so he prescribed it to himself to see if it would do anything about the strange, nagging worry in the back of his head. It was a good plan, too, and probably would have soothed his nerves enough to do his religion homework and go to bed.

Except.

There was a van in Ryan's driveway.

Ryan stopped short and groaned because not today, not today of all days, when all he wanted was to rest. When his dad wasn't home. Ryan's dad always warned him not to talk to strangers when he wasn't around, but the strangers that visited the little stucco house didn't always wait.

He could run. Turn around and bolt to Spencer's house and let someone else handle this.

But visitors so desperate to know their future that they found Ryan were not easily dissuaded. Plus, Spencer's parents didn't let them watch Nickelodeon. They thought it was bad tv.

Ryan walked to his house with grim determination. There were five boys leaning against the van, the youngest just a few years older than Ryan and the oldest probably in his mid twenties. Ryan walked right past them and up to his front door, thinking _go away go away go away_.

“Hey! Hey kid! Hey! Kid! Do you live here?”

Ryan rolled his eyes and turned around.

“I have a key, so. You know. One would hope.”

The oldest of the group, a stocky guy with braids sticking out of his head in crazy directions stepped forward.

“I'm Chris,” he said in a loathsome and sugar-sweet “I’m talking to a child!” voice. “What's your name, sweetie?”

“Ryan,” Ryan said sourly. “What do you want?”

Another older one, this one taller and bearded, had the audacity to bend down to talk to Ryan. Bend down! As if he were three years old and not a fairly tall eleven year old!

“Is your mommy home, Ryan?”

“She hasn't been in seven years,” Ryan said. The five of them looked nervous. Good. _Go away._

“Do you have a sister?” A third tried. This one didn't seem to condescend. He had curly hair and a spritely face, and the serious expression he wore didn't seem to fit him. It seemed to Ryan like this one must usually be smiling. And in fact, he looked familiar…

“Were you on the Mickey Mouse Club?” Ryan asked suddenly. The pretty boy gave a brief, sheepish grin.

“Yeah, I was,” he said.

“Cool.” Ryan almost smiled, but then remembered why they were there. “But no. My sisters live with my mom.”

Braids tried again.

“Are there any women living in the house with-?”

“Just me and my dad.”

“But this is the address!” the youngest one said. He sounded betrayed, and the game was getting old.

“Address for what?” Ryan sighed, as if he didn't already know.

“We're looking for the Oracle of Delphi.”

Ryan rolled his eyes again.

“Present. C’mon, let's get inside before the neighbors call the cops on you guys or something.”

Ryan led them out of the hot desert sun into his cool, dark living room. Ryan flicked on the lamps, but didn't touch the buzzing fluorescent overhead out of habit. His dad hated that light.

“Can I get you a drink?” Ryan asked once they'd all found seats-- on the couch, the arms of the couch, the floor, all of them avoiding the big La-Z-Boy that Ryan's dad slept in like they could tell it was off limits. “Um. We've got apple juice, grape juice, milk, water, vodka, beer…”

“What kinda beer?” the young one piped up, and stupid-braids-Chris smacked him on the back of the head with a sharp “Justin!” The kid pouted, and said “I'm good, actually.”

“Not to be rude,” a quiet, baby-faced boy with a southern accent said, “but how do we know for sure you're the Oracle?”

Ryan sighed. He reached out and touched the top of his hand with his finger tips, and as a wave of memories that weren't Ryan's crashed through his skull, his eyes widened. Damn. Vivid.

“So when you were in Berlin, and you met a man named Jack-” Ryan began, and he needed to go no farther. The guy's eyes widened and he yanked his hand back. Ryan smirked, and turned to the tall, condescending one.

“Sorry about the bite,” he said, “that looked gnarly.  Good thing the Backstreet Boys were there to save the day, right? And Justin, interesting the amount of weed you snuck out of Amsterdam without the TSA noticing, couldn't have anything to do with those glowing eyes, right? And JC-”

“Okay, we believe you!” Chris said. “Christ. You're really the Oracle?”

“One and only,” Ryan said.

“Wow,” JC, the pretty boy, said. “That's really cool, dude. So, um, how does this work?”

Oh, suckers. They should know better than to ask something like that.

“Well, first of all, I require payment,” Ryan said. The five of them looked at him blankly.

“I'm serious. Foretelling the future is hard work, and, uh, most of you look over 18, so-”

“We are not buying you porn!” Chris said. Ryan rolled his eyes. Jesus.

“Cool, didn't want you to. There's a book my dad told me I'm too young to read called “Invisible Monsters” and it sounds really cool. Plus, I disapprove of censorship. And I don't have ten dollars right now. So, if you guys pop on down to Barnes and Noble and buy me a copy, I'd be willing to share the future with you.”

“Is it a sex book?” Chris asked.

“For fuck’s sake!” they all cringed back when Ryan swore. “What are you, Baptists? It's just a book, okay? This author is gonna be huge soon. Fight Club. Watch out for it.”

“And we have to pay you before you tell us?” the tall one asked. (Ryan had learned through the brief flash through Lance's memory that his name was Joey.)

“Yup. You're already kinda killing my Fresh Prince and homework afternoon, so I'd like to guarantee I'm getting something out of it.”

“Fine,” Joey said. “But we're gonna leave someone here. Make sure you don't try and run away.”

“This is my house!” Ryan yelled, but four of them were already walking out, leaving baby-face (Lance, part vampire, gay and closeted) with him.

“So.” Lance looked awkward, barely old enough to babysit Ryan.

“I'm gonna watch TV,” Ryan told him, and turned on the TV as promised. He plopped down on the couch, flipping through channels to get where he wanted. Somewhere about twenty channels up from where he started, he noticed that Lance was very quiet. He sniffled next to him. Ryan rolled his eyes.

“It's not a big deal that you're gay,” he sighed, not so much a reassurance as something he was annoyed of having to say.

“Easy for you to say,” the kid sniffed. He was older than Ryan, sure, but still. Basically a kid.

“Yeah, easy for me to say,” Ryan agreed. It was on commercial break. Figured. “You know, I'm younger, I'm not gay, I grew up in Vegas, my dad's got gay friends, oh, and, don't forget, I see the freaking future.”

Lance froze next to him.

“What does that mean?” he asked.

“Means you can get married to a dude in about ten years in some states. Now lower your heart rate before your werewolf notices, bask in the glow of the future, and shut up, okay?”

He did shut up, much to Ryan's relief. And Ryan watched a whole episode and a half in piece. He even eventually noticed Lance very quietly laughing along at the jokes.

The rest of the band came back a little after the theme song, and Lance stiffened up, like he’d been doing something embarrassing. Chris thrust the book into Ryan’s hands and crossed his arms over his chest.

“So,” he said. Ryan’s stomach twisted tightly, nerves curling tightly and his breath speeding up. He did not want them to see his hands shaking. He smirked.

 “Alright,” Ryan said. “Whad’you want to know?”

“We think that our manager has done something,” Chris said. He paused. “Something bad.”

“Can you give me any more info? You’re only hurting yourselves if you try to keep this PG for my sake, don’t forget that,” Ryan said.

“We don’t know the details,” Justin piped up. “We just think he’s acting suspicious. He won’t give us any details about what’s going on-”

“What’s going on?” Ryan asked.

“There’s these creatures we’re fighting,” Joey said. “They’re called-- well, we don’t know if they have a real name, but we’ve been calling them singed. They’re like, super strong but look like they’ve been hanging out in a barbecue.”

“That helps,” Ryan said. His heart was racing, and he could feel sweat itching at the base of his skull where it met his neck. _You’re fine, you’re fine, you’re fine_. “Okay. What’s the manager’s name?”

“Lou Pearlman,” Chris said. Ryan nodded. He could already feel memories of things that had happened and things yet to come tugging at him, pulling against him like jabs of wind, but not yet, not just yet.

“Okay. I’ll find out some answers. I can’t guarantee it’ll be what you’re looking for, but I can guarantee you’ll leave with more knowledge than you came with. There’s only one rule: do not interrupt me. I don’t care if I’m screaming or crying or turning blue, you do not interrupt, do not make noise, do not try to wake me up unless my heart stops beating, okay?” Ryan said. “If you’re really worried, call the number on the fridge and ask for Spencer. He’ll know what to do.”

   “Wait, are you gonna have a seizure, or, like-?”

“See you in a few,” Ryan said, and his eyes rolled back in his head as he let the past and future memories overtake him.

The living room swirled out of existence and, for a sickening moment, he was free falling, plummeting past a blur of color and noise, shouting and jet engines and music. Endlessly music. All Ryan had to do was reach out and grab something…

Burning. Joey had mentioned burning. Ryan felt a flash of heat and blindly snatched at it.

He was lying on a table, his limbs big and unwieldy and strapped down to his sides. He was naked, and he didn't know whose body he was inhabiting, but he guessed it wasn't Lou Pearlman.

He, or the person he was inhabiting, looked up and saw a very overweight, sweaty man with beady eyes peering down at him.

“You're sure this is safe?” the person Ryan was in asked. The big man smiled with a smile that didn't reach his eyes.

“Don't you worry bout a thing, kid. You're gonna be a star.”

There was a pinch, a resistance on the skin of his inner elbow, and then a flood of endorphins. His eyes grew wide and he could see _everything_ \--

He was running on a treadmill, the miles per hour climbing higher, past ten, fifteen, past twenty, and he hadn't even broken a sweat. It felt amazing, his muscles expanding and responding like they'd been waiting his whole life for him to do this. He let out an exhilarated laugh. 25 miles per hour. The beady eyes man looked eager and greedy.

He was in a mirrored room, singing in harmony with four other boys, also lean, also muscular. He could feel power humming in their veins as well. He felt unstoppable. He had a fever, though. A flush that wouldn't leave his cheeks even when he sat down.

He was tied to the metal table again, thrashing against his restraints while the fever roiled inside him. God oh god he wanted to go home he wanted his girlfriend his best friend he want his _mom_ and everything hurt.

“Put him down before it gets worse,” the same man said, and Ryan and the man he inhabited screamed. A pale woman with blonde hair and no facial expression approached him, hypodermic needle in hand. He felt another pinch, something cool and black flowed through him, and he thought again, desperately, _mommy_.

He woke up again, still the same person but different now. The mind he inhabited was rotting, no, burning. His muscles still ached to be used but he was burning, burning, burning. Everything was fire and when he lifted his hand in front of his face it was charred black. He roared in fear, in pain, in anger. Burnt.

Everything else was flashes, shocks of images that came through the flurries of orange red yellow flame everywhere. An alley populated only by drunks. The faces of the band, angry and scared as they tried to kill him. His smoldering hands. Lou's voice: “we can try again. We just need to dilute the formula some more.”

The burning hit a fever pitch, and Ryan couldn't stop screaming.

Ryan lurched forward and put his head between his knees. His own living room faded back into existence, the sound of concerned voices echoing and bouncing around in brain like shrapnel.

“Should we call?”

“He said if his heart stopped-”

“Guys I don't like this.”

“He's just a kid.”

“Wait, he's stopped screaming.”

“Oh shit, check his pulse. Oh god, oh fuck, tell me we did not kill a kid.”

“Guys, I don't like this!”

“Check his wrist-”

“Shut up,” Ryan said. His voice was weak, but they all grew quiet at his request.

“Are you okay?” Lance asked.

“Like you care,” Ryan said under his breath. He spoke up. “Your manager won't tell you about the singed because he created them. They're people he injected with something, I dunno what, but now they're burning alive.”

They all looked horrified, and rightly so, but Ryan was too drained to feel properly upset anymore. He just wanted to go to sleep. And his dad. He sort of wanted his dad.

“How did he get to them to inject them?” Joey asked. Ryan shrugged.

“I- he was lying on a table, not the manager, the guy. Lou said he would make him a star. That mean anything to you?”

From the looks the all exchanged, it must have. Ryan was so tired, only barely not breaking to pieces in front of them. He was already trembling.

“Can you guys go?” He asked. “I'm tired, and I cant-”

“We can go,” Justin said. Thank God for Fae. “Thank you, Ryan.”

“Anytime,” Ryan said weakly, and didn't so much as stand up to lock the door as they left.

Seeing the future (or, more often than not, the past and present) was Ryan's job, but life was always more complicated than that. He couldn't just have a vision and describe it.

Ryan’s dad, who was the Oracle before the power passed on to Ryan, categorized three types of future telling: sight, search, and prophecy. Sight made the most sense to Ryan. Sight was just visions of things to come, or sometimes things that had happened or were happening. He dreamed in sight. He could seek such visions out, but only if he knew the subject well. That was how he watched Green Day, how he would one day keep tabs on the pop punk scene in Chicago.

Search was what people came to him for. He couldn't see something that had never simply come to him before unless he sought it out. Searching was similar to sight in every way except how it felt. Searching forced him into a first person perspective, making him live out what he was looking for. Usually people searched when there was trouble, so usually it hurt.

Searching also left his mind vulnerable, made him see in his dreams for days all the bad things he could usually block out. It made him defenseless against seeing all the terrible things to come.

Prophecy was simpler, but arguably the most annoying. Ryan would, at complete random, seize and black out, and according to everyone around him, he would spout off a prophecy that he had no memory of. If Spencer or his dad was around, they would write it down, but most prophecies made no sense to Ryan.

And then… there was a fourth type. One his dad had never mentioned, so Ryan did not know if he had even had it. But sometimes Ryan heard a voice. It was very rare, but she would, no more than once a year, whisper something in his mind. A warning, usually. She stopped him and Spencer from getting in a car with a stranger once, and they later arrested the man for killing another boy their age. Ryan thought she might be the real Oracle, the original spirit just living inside him, but he was too afraid to ask.

That night it didn't seem to matter. His dad came home early, cheese pizza in hand and worried expression on his face.

“Are you okay?”

George Ross II’s powers had transferred to Ryan when Ryan was four years old, but he could still see a little. Not as much as The Oracle, but once obtained, sight never truly leaves. He probably only had a vague sense of what happened, but it was enough that he knew Ryan needed him.

Ryan nodded, fiddling with frayed string on his jeans.

“Band came in looking for some help. I found what they were looking for. They were in and out. No big deal.”

His dad clearly didn't believe him, but he nodded anyway, because that was what Ryan needed.

The two of them stayed up late that night, watching action movies send eating pizza. His dad only had two bottles of beer, which was a big deal for him. Eventually, as the credits to _Speed_ rolled and his dad lay snoring in the armchair, Ryan realized he could barely keep his eyes open. He was afraid to sleep, afraid of the things he would see, but oh, he was so tired.

Ryan trudged to his bedroom, and, though he fought to stay awake, fell asleep almost as soon as his head touched the pillow.

In his dream, Ryan was sitting in the driver's seat of a car, empty pill bottle in one hand and Nokia phone in the other. His brain felt warm and fuzzy like fresh cotton candy, and “Hallelujah” was playing softly on the radio.

He was in a recording studio, guitar in hand, trying to be confident he needed to be confident he needed-

He was flat on his back in a dusty shack in the desert. He watched the grenade soar through the window and thought to himself “goddamn, what will they put in the body bag?” before the world went white.

He was bent over homework in a bedroom filled with music posters, frustrated tears dripping on the same math problem he'd been looking at for hours thinking “god I'm so stupid why am I so stupid!”

He was underwater, swimming past so much bone white coral, all dead, all bleached by acic.

He was curled up in bed, feeling his bones snap and stretch as the wolf inside him took over.

And then, for the first time, he was no one at all. He hovered in the room, like a ghost, but he was still Ryan. He took up no physical space. And on the other side of the room, face pressed up against the glass, was a boy. He was younger than Ryan, nor by much, with messy brown hair and gangly limbs, and he was crying.

Still crying a little, the boy started singing. His voice was soft and small, but it struck Ryan as the sort of voice that would someday be hauntingly beautiful. He, like the radio earlier in Ryan's dream, was singing Hallelujah, very, very softly. He closed his eyes as he did, the thin notes swirling around the room and around Ryan.

“...you don't really care for music, do you?”

The tears slowed as he sang, and Ryan watched him, absolutely transfixed. While he was singing, something had happened. There was something outside, something like flurries of snow, except it wasn't snow. It was sand, Ryan realized, and it undulated in perfect time with the music.

“That's him,” the voice in his head whispered, her voice almost reverent.

The music was calming, lulling Ryan to a calm darkness. Just before the dream faded entirely, he reached out as though to touch the boy, and the image faded like smoke.

 


	2. Genesis

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A genesis, or a beginning, wherein Ryan sees a future he isn't prepared for, gets his first sight of a soon to be famous band in Chicago, and meets someone new.

January, 2003

Ryan steeled himself before he walked into the chapel. Father Merrin had it out for Ryan, and Ryan was constantly afraid that one day the priest would discover what was really wrong with him, that he'd declare Ryan a witch and burn him at the stake. Proverbially, of course. There were laws against such things now, even in Las Vegas.

But just in case, Ryan used confession as a chance to throw him off the scent. It was a sacred rite, so Father Merrin couldn't tell anyone what Ryan said, so Ryan made up terrible things (or, at the very least, un-Catholic things) so that the father would not suspect worse. Recently, the priest had been breathing down Ryan's neck more than usual, and two days ago had walked in on the end of a prophecy Ryan had had in the boys’ bathroom. Things were getting dangerous, so Ryan needed to play his trump card.

He had to come out to the priest.

It was dangerous, no denying that, but Ryan was at his wits end. Between homosexuality and witchcraft-- well, they did live in Las Vegas. So long as Ryan seemed plenty contrite, he supposed the priest would accept some gay thoughts.

It wasn't even entirely a lie but that. That was something Ryan really wasn't ready to think about.

So Ryan paced. He walked back and forth in front of the chapel door while the girl in front of Ryan (Samantha Roland, it was in alphabetical order) finished her confession. A part of Ryan (a large part, in fact) wondered about the legality of forcing students to go to confession once a week, even in private school, but he didn’t know what he could do about it. In any case, Ryan used to almost like confession. The dimly lit booth brought him a certain sense of peace, and Father Merrin’s reassuring voice made Ryan feel clean of guilt, born anew, and all of the things that were meant to come with confession.

But Ryan stopped believing, and his visions got more prevalent, and he couldn’t tell the priest about his real problems anymore. Confession had started to feel like something dirty, the air thick and cloying with the scent of incense, and Ryan dreaded his moments in the confessional, where it felt like Merrin’s pale blue eyes where cutting right into Ryan’s soul. When Ryan made up asinine things to say (cheated on a math test, didn’t pray for my father, had lustful thoughts about Marla from Chem, lied during last confession) he could swear that the priest _knew_ , that he was disappointed in Ryan, angry at him. But that, Ryan knew, wasn’t possible. Still, the thought made him squirm, as did spending any amount of time locked in the tiny wooden box with Father Merrin. So. He needed something good and real and damning to get the priest off his back. Gay thoughts was the only solution he could come up with.

As he waited for Samantha’s confession to end (hers always ran over; Ryan didn’t know what she did, what sin she was always committing, but it must be bad) his mind starting seeking out the boy against his will. It had become a habit, whenever he was sad or scared, to ground himself by focusing on the boy, the one who had first showed up in his dream from the night so many years ago and sang him to sleep.

Ryan didn’t know the boy’s name. He wasn’t even so much of a boy anymore, barely younger than Ryan, but he wasn’t quite a man either. He was… cute. Pretty. Not handsome, not yet, but Ryan suspected he would be when he was older. He was pretty, though, if a little gangly and oily-faced. He had soft eyes and soft hair and a voice that made Ryan melt when he heard it. He wasn’t singing all the time, but he must have sang quite frequently, because it seemed that every time Ryan went looking for him in his mind’s eye at night, he was singing softly. A few years back, he had started accompanying himself with guitar some nights, piano others. His voice made Ryan feel safe, his eyes made him feel whole, and he didn’t even know the fucker’s name. (Or his age, which disturbed Ryan ever so slightly. He didn’t suspect that the nameless boy was much younger than himself, given the way they seemed to age together, but he did not want to discover that he was obsessed with a fourteen year old or something. He’d read _Lolita_. He was not impressed by the excuses Humbert Humbert came up with.)

And there were times-- not frequent, but occasional, where Ryan would see him pulling off his shirt as he got ready for bed, and he didn’t look away, close his eyes, jerk himself back into reality and stop daydreaming. He drew the line at watching the definitely underaged stranger masturbate, thinking of absolutely anything else when he saw the low-quality images behind the boy on his boxy computer screen, but even so, his thoughts weren’t entirely platonic over the years.

The boy in his dreams didn’t stop Ryan from appreciating the senior girls hemming their uniform skirts a little too short, or from glancing down Donna Evan’s too-tight polo when she unbuttoned it to study with him outside, but it definitely meant that he wasn’t entirely straight. He didn’t think that was a sin, but he sure as hell didn’t know what to do with that information, and he knew that as far as the Catholic church was concerned, it wasn’t exactly pure.

But how to phrase that without cluing the priest into his visions? That he wasn’t sure of. And, in his panic, he searched out the boy with the voice.

It didn’t take long, attuned as Ryan was to the sight of him. He soon found him, bent over what looked like a math test with his eyebrows scrunched together in an expression somewhere between horror and disgust. It looked like Trig, that was promising. Freshmen didn’t take Trig if they were going to have that much trouble with it. Unfortunately, if he was in math class, it seemed unlikely that he was going to be singing anytime soon. Ryan’s nerves tightened yet again as he slowly resurfaced into reality, still standing just in front of the chapel doors.

Just in time, apparently, as the door slammed open and Samantha stomped out, hair streaming behind her. Ryan’s stomach flipped over, and he heard Father Merrin’s smooth voice echoing out into the hall: “Come in, Mr. Ross.”

Ryan genuflected at the door, and again at the foot of the altar before turning to the left and walking into the confessional booth. He leaned his head back against the warm wood and took a deep breath. Already the heavy stench of incense made him feel sleepy and stupid, but he focused on keeping his thoughts in order.

“My son,” Merrin said, his voice softer now, like the rustling of old paper.

“Father,” Ryan said. He bowed his head forward.

“May the Lord be with you.”

“And also with you.”

“Let us pray.”

Ryan bent his head further, his chin nearly pressed to his chest as the words fluttered from his lips, so long memorized, so ingrained within him. “Our Father who art in heaven…”

While Ryan rushed through the Lord's Prayer on autopilot, his mind started to drift, tugged gently in one direction by forces unseen, outside of his control. He fought back, determined to stay focused, to not let this moment right now slip away from him.

“...in your name we pray…”

Ryan was gone, out of body like when he visited the boy, in a dark room with Father Merrin. Merrin looked up, pale eyes resigned, and said “I wondered when you would come for me. Oh, Father forgive me for I have-”

Some shadow just outside of Ryan's view lunged forward and Merrin gasped. His eyes grew wide and his breath grew short, and when the shadow disappeared from Ryan's vision, Merrin was clutching his chest with two pale hands that were turning red as blood flowed over them.

Ryan could see the wet shine on his black robes grow larger and larger as Merrin stumbled, and a voice from just behind Ryan asked:

“Did you really think you could atone for your sins?”

Merrin fall to his knees, air whistling in and out of his mouth. His hand hit the floor, smearing the carpet with blood.

Then the voice was in Ryan’s ear, breath hot against his neck.

“Do you still think you can atone for yours?”

Ryan lurched forward. He threw one hand out in front of him to catch his fall, only to strike it against the warm wood of the confessional. His vision returned to him, still dark and dreamlike but concrete, inside the booth. His hand throbbed where he had hit it, and he was struggling for breath.

“Ryan? Ryan? Are you alright?”

“S-s-sorry,” Ryan said. Confessional. Chapel. Confession. Merrin. Bleeding- no, fuck, not bleeding, not murdered, alive! He was right here! And about to notice something was really wrong! Focus on the concrete, then, smell of incense, feel of unforgiving wood. Voice of Father Merrin.

“Sorry,” Ryan said, his voice slightly stronger. “Ahem. I-I fell asleep for a second there. I didn’t get much sleep last night.”

“Ryan,” Father Merrin said, seemed like he was going to say something else, and then said, “Tell me your confessions.”

“I.” Ryan couldn’t keep his thoughts in order. His mind was spinning and he just kept seeing the image of Father Merrin dying, bleeding out, murdered. He had to focus but he simply couldn’t.

“I’ve been having sexual thoughts about boys?” Ryan’s breathing was shallow as it came out like a question.

The other side of the confessional was silent.

“I think about--” make it convincing convince him make him forget-- “I dream about a boy. I don’t know who he is but I dream about him almost every night. And I have… impure thoughts about him. Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.”

Merrin’s silence continued for just a moment.

“My son,” he said, “Ryan Ross. You have committed many sins in your life, but loving someone is not one of them.”

f that, Ryan had no idea what to think.

Merrin sounded suddenly and inexplicably weary.

“Go in peace, my son. There is much to discuss later, but for now, go in peace. I believe the bell is going to ring soon anyway.”

“Thank you, Father,” Ryan said, and he stumbled on his way out of the confessional, hitting his head on the side of the door and falling into his genuflection on the way out. He sprinted to the men’s bathroom, sliding down in front of a toilet with just enough time to bend over and vomit loudly.

The bell rang. Ryan slammed the stall door shut behind him and threw up again, a clammy sweat breaking out on his forehead. Something was wrong, so wrong. Father Merrin did not look much older in Ryan’s vision, and his killer did not look human.

Ryan clutched the toilet to hold himself in place. The bathroom didn’t fill up during passing period, as the toilet next to the chapel never really filled up. He was just about to get to his feet when he heard a voice.

“Ryan? You in here?”

“Yeah.”

Ryan swung the stall door open and looked up at Spencer, arms crossed over his chest. Spencer was shorter than Ryan, but stockier, and he felt more solid than Ryan ever did. Looking up at him, as he did then, from his position on the floor, felt strangely natural, though he would never admit it.

“Father Merrin said you got sick in confession,” Spencer said. The sentence was innocent enough, but Ryan could see a deeper understanding in his eyes. Spencer had a keen ability to see right through Ryan. It was innate, but over the years it had become so fine tuned that they could practically read one another’s minds.

Ryan nodded, and pulled his knees up into his chest. He didn’t know how to tell Spencer, what to say, how to explain that he could still feel incense and blood thick inside his nostrils. Instead, he said:

“You wanna ditch?”

“No, but I feel like we’re going to anyway,” Spencer said. He stuck a hand out to Ryan and pulled him to his feet, then caught him when Ryan staggered. Solid, sturdy, Spencer. Ryan felt better already, half-leaning on his best friend.

“What’d I do to deserve you, Spence?” he asked.

“Not nearly enough,” Spencer said, but he cracked a grin. “Lunch? Taco Bell?”

“Taco Bell.”

***

The two snuck out of the gymnasium exit after the second bell rang, signalling the end of passing period. Ryan, unwilling to pay for student parking, had left his car a couple blocks away from Bishop Gorman High School.

When counting the people he was closest to in his life, with Spencer obviously taking the number one slot, Ryan’s car probably ranked between his dad and Brent. Granted, this position was fairly low on the list, as the list of people (or things) Ryan was close to was exactly five long. Still, it was an honored position, and Matilda (or Tilda for short) the faded red Toyota Camry was a better friend than most people Ryan had ever met. Spencer thought it was creepy that he had personified his car, but Ryan was attached, damn it. He knew it was stupid and kind of douchey to name his car, especially to give it a girl name, but Ryan felt something for her. She really did feel like a friend to him, like someone he could depend on. He didn’t say all of this out loud for fear of Spencer telling him he had lost it completely, but he did insist on the use of her name. To Ryan, his car felt like an older sister, someone who took care of him, someone he could trust to be there for him when the world was falling apart. Spencer and Brent liked to say she was named Matilda because it was the only way Ryan could get a girl to interact with him.

Whatever the case, she was a dependable car. Not flashy like the porches some of the kids at Bishop Gorman drove, or utilitarian like the Range Rovers that could cross all the way across Death Valley and into LA on one tank of gas and not touching wheels to pavement, so designed for off road. No, she wasn’t really a special car except in the way that Ryan loved her. And she could drive. She got the job done, and that was more than Ryan could ask of most things in his life. She took him to and from school, work, and Spencer’s house, and that day, to their frequented lunch locale.  

The two of them screeched into the Taco Bell in record time, pushing past the crowd of hesitant, fat tourists and putting in their orders with a well practiced finesse. The two of them found a booth in the back to sit down in, as it was a brisk sixty degrees outside.

Once Ryan had downed his first extra large Baha Blast in half a second, he leaned forward, voice low.

“I saw something in the confessional,” he said.

“Water is wet,” Spencer rolled his eyes. “What did you see?”

Ryan shivered, suddenly feeling the chill of the soda radiating through his chest.

“I saw Father Merrin-” he felt like there was something choking him. To his shock, Ryan realized that he was getting emotional about the death of the priest. He had never really thought that he liked the priest that much, but then, he’d known the man for so many years. The thought of him dead was… unsettling. More than unsettling. It was making him sad.

“I saw Father Merrin get murdered,” Ryan said. Spencer choked on his drink, spitting bright blue soda all over the table.

“You what?!”

“Keep your voice down!” Ryan hissed. He glanced around, ate a bite, and ducked his head lower.

“I was about to start confession when I was pulled into a vision and I saw-- I saw something stab him. I think.”

“You think? Something?”

“I couldn’t see what it was,” Ryan said. “I wasn’t him. I wasn’t… I wasn’t anybody.”

“Has that ever happened before?”

“Um. Once or twice, in my dreams.”

The one thing Ryan had never told Spencer about was the boy. They had no secrets, they knew each other inside and out, but He was something private. Sometimes Ryan didn’t even know if the guy was real, but in any case, how did he tell his friend he was falling in love with a dream boy?

“Okay,” Spencer leaned back. “But, never for another vision, right? Is there any chance that it… that it isn’t going to happen?”

“Every vision I have either already happened or is going to come true. Case closed,” Ryan said. “I think it’s going to happen soon, and I don’t even know what _it_ is. It looked like just a shadow, but that’s not possible. No such thing exists.”

“And yet,” Spencer said. Ryan waited, and Spencer shrugged. “Look, if every vision you and your dad have ever had always comes true, then it must be true too. Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains--”

“However improbably must be the truth, yeah, thanks Sherlock, but how does that help us?”

“I guess it doesn’t matter,” Spencer said, but he looked troubled. “If there’s nothing we can do, then, well, there’s nothing we can do, right?”

“Right,” Ryan said, but he felt uneasy. “It's just…”

“He's Father Merrin,” Spencer said softly. “Yeah. I know. But what could we do? Warn him?”

Ryan snorted. “Guess not.”

Ryan's hunger after losing his breakfast had dissipated, and he only picked at the remains of his tacos. He didn't even like the damn priest. But all that blood… he couldn't eat, couldn't even think about it. Spencer gave Ryan's tray a pointed glance, but didn't say anything.

They waited at the restaurant until three in the afternoon, so that Ryan could take Spencer home without his parents suspecting they were up to something. Ryan idled outside of Spencer’s door, while Spencer got out.

“Band practice later,” Spencer said. “Don’t forget. And Brent’s bringing the new guitarist he knows today to try out.”

“Ugh,” Ryan rolled his eyes, and Spencer glared.

“Ryan,” he said.

“What?”

“Look, just be-- try and be _nice_ , okay?”

“I’m _nice_ ,” Ryan said, affronted. Spencer laughed, a little fondly, a little embarrassed.

“No, you’re not,” he said. “And I like that, but it puts some people off. You’re a little…”

Ryan scowled. “A little what?” he asked, though he knew what. Ryan wasn’t good with people. He _was_ off-putting. He had a tendency to say things that freaked people out and make no secret his disdain for others. But it hurt a little to hear Spencer say it.

Seeming to sense that he had gone too far, Spencer held his hands up.

“Just be nice, and be normal, okay? Give him a chance.”

“Who is he?” Ryan asked wearily.

“I don’t remember his name, but Brent says he’s some kind of musical whiz kid. My grade, band geek. Mormon.”

“Hanging out with Catholics? Damnation awaits us all, doesn’t it?”

“See you later,” Spencer said, clapping the top of the car. “Be nice!”

“No promises!” Ryan yelled out of the window as he rolled away from the curve. Matilda’s engine snarled beneath Ryan’s feet. He sped back home, hoping to maybe get a nap in before practice. He hadn’t slept much the night previously, but then, he didn’t get a lot of sleep most nights.

His dad wasn’t home yet, so Ryan could probably knock himself out with a shot of vodka before lying down, but he didn’t want to sleep through the whole afternoon. Instead, he curled up on his couch, leaving all the lights in the living room out.

It was January in Las Vegas, so it was chilly out, justifiable for Ryan to wear hoodies and fingerless gloves when he changed out of his school uniform. He didn’t turn the heat on, because his dad always said it was “fucking ridiculous” to have heat on in Nevada, so he pulled an old throw blanket up over his shoulders. He layed down on the couch, leaning his head against the back wall and drifted out of consciousness almost immediately.

Ryan knew he was not destined for a particularly restful nap. Some vision had been tugging at him all day, and since he hadn't succumbed while awake, it came to him in his dreams.

The person Ryan was sharing headspace with definitely did not live nearby. Ryan felt half asleep and was surrounded by whorls of thick, wet snow. A timid, nerdy looking guy in front of him said: “you're going to forget this.” Terror and foreboding rushed through Ryan, but the body he was in refused to pull away, and the other man's teeth sank into his neck.

Ryan had _seen_ vampire attacks before, but always from the perspective of a third-party observer or the vampire himself. Being the one getting bitten was horrible. He was overcome with a sickening feeling of lightness, of being drained, like he could feel himself losing volume as he stood. His legs weakened, no longer able to hold him as his vision began to blur, but the vampire held him upright. For a moment. Then someone yelled and he was falling, falling, unconscious before he hit the cold ground.

Then he was someone else, but he had the shocking sensation that it was the same day, the same group of people. He was sitting in an old, straight backed chair and looking over at a man (kid, really, close to Ryan's age) laid out and covered in blankets. There were two small puncture marks on his neck, and snow was melting and dripping out of his hair.

“He really didn't mean to,” a familiar voice said.

“Do his intentions matter all that much? He could have died!” Ryan shouted.

“He feels awful.”

“He should!”

“Shh,” the first voice cautioned. “You'll wake him.”

They both fell silent for a minute. Ryan was the first to speak again.

“Guess magic's out of the bag now. How do you think he'll handle me turning into a wolf?”

“No idea,” the other guy said, “but hopefully the label will force him to stick with us.”

Then Ryan was inside the mind of the first one again, the one whose neck still throbbed with the phantom pain of vampire venom.

He was strung upside down in an industrial kitchen, blood rushing to his face as he remembered the creature making her way towards him. She was skeletal under tight stretches of graying skin, lipless and soaked in blood. Ryan thrashed where he was hung, fear coursing through him. This thing was going to kill him, he was going to die, and the realization was too much. She was going to come back and kill him and he hadn’t even believed monsters were real before today.

“Andy?”

The name escaped his mouth without Ryan thinking it, a panicked plea. He twisted and was able to see the vampire from earlier next to him, strung up the same way. But he was Ryan’s friend. The blood running down his neck, onto his face, that didn’t matter.

“Yeah, I’m right here.”

This Andy person sounded panicked too, thrashing in his bonds and trying to untie the ones connected to his ankles to no effect. He kept talking as he did, but all Ryan could hear was the pounding of blood in his ears, the throb of blood and pain.

He was not shocked when he saw the wendigo come back in, but he was terrified. He’d never seen anything like her before, still hardly believed that he was in a band with a vampire, but there she was. A skeleton with all of her teeth visible and glistening red.

“Eat you?” she responded to something the vampire had said with a high, girlish voice. It was perky, bubble gum-y, and somehow made her gory appearance all the worse. “Well, duh, silly. I’m _famished_.”

_I don’t want to see this_ , Ryan thought desperately. _I don’t want to see anymore_.

To his surprise, the industrial kitchen and the bloody waitress vanished. Instead, his vision centered on the boy, hair blown out of his eyes by the wind as he walked down a residential street, singing very quietly to himself.

“...hope you have the time of your life,” he sang, very softly. Ryan felt like he could breathe again, no longer paralyzed by fear. There was still a tug within him, trying to pull him back to the band and their doomed battle with a wendigo, but he didn’t care. He could ignore it, at least for a bit now, he was sure.

Ryan woke up gasping for breath. The light outside had grown dusky and heavy, and he realized before even looking at the clock that he was late. He had questions: who they were, what they were doing, why it was important, what kind of music they played, but all that could wait. It was 5:15 already, and Matilda's engine roared as he raced across Summerlin.

Spencer lived close enough that Ryan didn't really need to drive, but it sped the trip up enough that it was only twenty after when he knocked on the garage door, still rubbing his eyes. His head hurt, and his mouth was dry from sleeping too long, and he could still feel pain that wasn't really there where someone else was bitten by a vampire.

Perhaps due to all of this, he forgot that someone was coming to try out that night. So when the door swung out to reveal three people instead of two crowded around the back card table, Ryan was confused for a moment.

“Oh, he said out loud, still fuzzy with sleep. “The new guy, right? Brent's friend?”

The stranger turned around to nod, and Ryan froze. He didn't need the voice in his head, almost frantic in her intensity to tell Ryan who it was, because he would recognize the face anywhere. The face from his dreams for seven years.

_It's him._

 


	3. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ryan meets the boy of his dreams. It's never that simple.

            “Hey! I'm Brendon!”

            The Boy, one and only, figment of Ryan's dreams, stuck out his hand. Ryan, for his part, stared. He stared first at the hand then back up at the boy. It was the same face, he was sure of that, even if the expression was unfamiliar. Usually in Ryan's dreams he didn't have a bright and eager smile plastered on his face. The boy Ryan knew usually looked melancholy and focused while he sang, played piano, strummed his guitar. He was also rarely in such good lighting, which had the unfortunate effect of making his rather prominent acne even more noticeable. Also: that truly unfortunate haircut.

            Still, this was _literally_ the boy of Ryan's dreams, and he couldn't help drowning himself in the sight of him. The precise dark shade of his hair that matched his eyes so perfectly, the sharp cut of his nose across his face, the faded colors of his hand-me-down clothes, the nervous but also creeped out look on his face-- oh. Ryan realized too late that he'd been staring, blank faced, for too long. He watched as Brendon slowly let his hand sink. _Fuck_.

            “Um, right, Brendon?” Ryan tried to collect his thoughts. He was too fresh out of a dream for this, to wild-brained, too scattered. “Sorry. I'm Ryan.”

_It's him it's him it's him!_ His brain sang. Brendon was still eyeing him oddly. Ryan wanted to melt into the floor.

            Instead, he stuffed his hands into the pockets of his hoodie and shut up. He was supposed to say something else, he was sure of it, but he didn't know what.

            “Don't get offended,” Brent drawled. “Ryan's this rude with everyone. You get used to it.”

            Why, Ryan wondered, was he born with the power to see the future, instead of something useful like being able to murder people with only a glance?

            “Ruder, when I can manage it,” Ryan said. He glanced Brendon up and down once more, greedy for the sight of him, but trying to act natural. “So. You play guitar.”

            It wasn't a question, but Brendon nodded assent.

            “I play everything,” he said. Somehow, the words didn't sound overtly cocky in his voice. It rang instead with the sureness of someone who knew damn well they could back up every claim they made. “You're the singer, right?”

            Lightning rocked through Ryan. Here was his chance to prove that this was the same boy.

            “Yeah. You sing?”

            Brendon shook his head, and something in Ryan wilted.

            “You don’t like, accompany yourself while playing… everything?” Ryan asked. Brendon laughed uncomfortably.

            “Not really,” he said. His hands were jammed deep into his pockets. Ryan wanted to say something, anything, but he’d made one friend when he was five years old, and he wasn’t really sure how to replicate that. It wasn’t as though he could offer Brendon a juice box. And now he couldn’t prove this was the boy, which was.

            It was a problem.

            “Play any Blink-182?” Ryan asked.

            “A bit,” Brendon said. “You guys cover a lot of Blink?”

            “It’s all we know how to play,” Spencer said. “This isn’t… the best band.”

            “That’s cool,” Brendon said. “We can learn more.”

            They had better, Ryan thought. He had a vision of a photoshoot for Rolling Stone when he was seven years old, but at the moment getting more than two downloads on PureVolume sounded pretty out of reach.

            “You know ‘Dammit’?” Ryan asked. When Brendon nodded his assent, Ryan tossed him a guitar pick. The kid (maybe not the Boy, how could he tell, he looked different, not dream clouded, and maybe the dreams were just dreams, dammit, Ryan didn’t know) caught it and looked terrified.

            “What, you just want me to start playing?”

            “You said you could play guitar. If you’re good, you’re probably better than us,” Ryan said. They didn’t have a microphone yet, didn’t know what to buy and got laughed out of the Guitar Center last time they asked, so for the time being, Ryan just sang loud.

            Brendon _could_ play guitar. He did justice to the song, even if he was kind of stiff at first. He loosened up as they played a collection of Blink-182 greatest hits, joking off and on with Brent, and eventually Spencer. Mostly, he cast Ryan nervous looks. Ryan broke two guitar strings strumming with too much force. Still, at least he didn’t say “I’ve dreamt about you,” when he met Brendon. It could have been worse.

            “Damn, you’re pretty good at this,” Spencer said after a few songs. “And you’re sixteen? What else can you do?”

            “I play bass, piano, trombone, and I do a mean Andy Serkis impression,” Brendon said.

            “Aw, shit, really?” Spencer asked. Ryan rolled his eyes. Hoped that Brendon couldn’t see it.

            Brendon swung his guitar over his shoulder so that it rested on his back and dropped down into a squat, contorting his face and bugging his eyes out. Ryan stared at him in exactly the way he would stare at a train wreck. He was getting secondhand embarrassment and Brendon probably wasn’t even embarrassed.

            “My prrreccciouss,” he hissed, crawling across Spencer’s floor. Ryan sort of wanted to melt into the floor, but also, he couldn’t help it. He laughed. It wasn’t actually a bad Gollum impression.

            Brent and Spencer fell into absolute hysterics, and Brendon, reading a crowd quickly, grabbed hold of Spencer’s shirt and moved the bug-eyed stare up to his face, making Spencer’s guffaws grow even louder. Ryan just snorted a few times, but it was a big deal for him, evident in the way Brent stared at him like he’d grown a second head.

            “Holy shit, he laughs,” Brent said. Ryan flipped him off.

            “I just never laugh around you because your face is so fucking tragic it makes me want to cry,” he said, which made _Brendon_ start laughing. And dammit, but he had a nice laugh. Too loud, and Ryan loved it. He needed to get himself together.

            “So, we’ll see you next week?” Ryan asked. Brendon sobered up and nodded quickly.

            “Just the one practice every week?” he asked.

            “Until hockey season’s over,” Spencer said, his voice betraying some of his long suffering. Ryan suck his tongue out at him, and Spencer grinned. At least one thing felt normal today.

            “Alright, guess I’ll see you later, then,” Brendon said. He waved. Awkwardly. Ryan sighed.

            “You can hang out here for a bit if you want,” he said.

            “It’s my house, dickbag,” Spencer said.

            “Can he?”

            “I mean, yeah.”

            “C’mon,” Ryan said. He pushed his guitar up against the wall of the garage and led the way inside. Brendon looked nervous around him still, but he came inside.

            Walking right up beside Spencer, Ryan whispered: “Am I being _nice_ enough?” and Spencer sighed before nodding. Ryan felt a tiny bit of real relief. Friendship didn’t come to him easily, and his and Brent’s relationship was still tenuous at best, held mostly through Spencer’s personality and a fondness for dirty jokes. Everyone else was… tolerable.

            But Brendon.

            Inside, Mr. Smith had already added an extra pan full of enchiladas, giving Spencer and Ryan specifically a knowing smile.

            “Staying for dinner, Ry?” he asked.

            “If it’s not an intrusion,” Ryan said. He felt a little guilty for not going home, but the warmth of Spencer’s house was irresistible. He had no idea why the Smith’s liked him so much, but he firmly believed in all the advice given about where not to look at gift horses, so he accepted their kindness with as much grace as he could manage.

            “How ‘bout you boys? Brent? And, ah, Spencer, I don’t think you’ve introduced me to this young man?”

            “Dad, Brendon, Brendon, Dad,” Spencer waved his hand between the two of them. “Wanna hang around?”

            “I’m good,” Brent said. “My mom’s picking me up in a half hour or so.”

            “Sure,” Brendon said. He looked bewildered, but happy nonetheless. Ryan could sympathize. Spencer’s family made him feel the same way.

            They went into Spencer’s room, hanging out loosely without any real activities in mind. Spencer and Brendon both sat on the bed, Spencer asking him about some of his preferences in music. While Brendon spoke, Ryan stood by the window watching the last bloody sunbeams sink below the jagged mountaintops and thought. Without the focus lent by playing guitar, his mind was drifting again.

            He could feel a continuation of the vision from earlier tugging at him, pulling his mind like strong wind he was struggling against. It yanked him towards it, towards unconsciousness, and the longer he stared the louder it got until he could hear voices in his ears.

            _“Stop being an idiot”_

_“Oh my god, you’re okay, Jesus, you’re okay”_

_“What was that thing?”_

            “Shut up,” Ryan whispered, and he pressed his forehead to the quickly cooling glass.

            _“Wendigo-”_

_“Are we sure it’s dead?”_

_“How do you kill-?”_

“Ryan?”

            “Is he okay?”

            _The kitchen was spattered in blood and why was this so important nothing dragged him out of his life like this not twice in the same day and someone was there with a big relieved grin horsey teeth black hair kinda hot fae wrong too powerful calamitous-_

_The room swam properly into view. Ryan’s neck throbbed, and he was being hugged._

_“Christ, it’s good you already knew about us,” he laughed. Pete, the brain Ryan was inhabiting offered. His name was Pete Wentz._

            “Ryan!”

            Ryan’s eyes snapped open. He was staring at a familiar ceiling, familiar because he passed out in this room often. A few dirty glow-in-the-dark stars were still stuck up above him, ones he helped Spencer put up back in fourth grade. Spencer. Home. Band practice. Reality. Ground yourself.

            “Sorry,” Ryan said, sitting up and scooting back so he could lean against the wall.

            “Are you okay?” Brendon asked. His eyes were huge with worry which was… sweet. Sort of weird for a stranger. (And probably not the boy no way to prove it and Ryan just _felt_ like if it were Brendon then Brendon would know too. The boy out there would know Ryan like Ryan knew him, he was sure of it. Brendon was just a lookalike. The thought made his chest hurt.)

            “Fine,” Ryan said sourly. Brendon looked too sweet, and he hated being babied.

            “But you-!” Brendon sputtered. “You just collapsed! Should we call a doctor or-”

            “Ryan's got a condition,” Brent said. Bless him. He never did bother to Google Ryan's “condition,” but he defended it rabidly. “You don't have to worry about it.”

            “But,” Brendon's face was scrunched up with worry and confusion. He was excessively animated. “You were unconscious. That's serious.”

            Ryan found that he was a little stunned at being the one addressed about himself. Usually people talked to Spencer about him even when he stood right there.

            “Blood sugar thing,” Ryan said. “Erm. My dad’s Yugoslavian on his mom's side, and anemia runs in the family. Combined with living so close to the equator. You know.”

            “But Nevada isn't that close to the equator.”

            If Ryan hadn't been lying, Brendon would have been very rude. As it was, he was still making Ryan squirm. What was he supposed to say? Usually people heard medical issues and didn’t touch the subject again. The translation for medical was personal, out-of-bounds.

            Ryan got the feeling that Brendon didn’t really believe in personal or out-of-bounds.

            “Closer than Yugoslavia,” Ryan said eventually. “Don’t worry about it. It’s not a big thing.”

            “So we’re not taking you to a hospital?” Brendon asked. Floundering.

            “Definitely not,” Ryan said. “This happens all the time. My blood sugar is just low.” A lie, technically, but the Gatorade Spencer tossed to him from the mini fridge by his desk was definitely going to make Ryan feel better. He drank deeply, his hands trembling when he went to replace the cap. He was still being pulled, but gently now. He knew he hadn’t eaten enough, and the electrolytes and sugar probably were helping him.

            “Brent, your mother’s here!” Mrs. Smith called from the front room. Brent stood up and shrugged his backpack on with gruff goodbyes to Ryan and Spencer and a “see you tomorrow” to Brendon.

            Ryan curled up in the corner made by Spencer’s bed and bedside table, still sipping Gatorade. Pete Wentz, he thought to himself. The name didn’t sound familiar in a way that made him feel like he’d heard it out loud, not in the real world, but still he recognized it. Another oracle perk, he supposed. He could tell things that would be important, and this man, this name was buzzing in his head like a natural disaster. He gave Spencer a meaningful look when he could. Spencer nodded in acknowledgement. More to discuss later.

            Brendon, though he shot occasional nervous glances at Ryan, mostly seemed intent on eating up all the energy in the room. Spencer had to ask him a few times to lower his voice, which Brendon did, only to get louder again as he got excited about something. Still too tired and fighting off the pull of _show me show me_ in his brain, Ryan drifted in and out of conversation, but mostly just listened to the hum of them talking.

            Dinner was a relief, both because cooking at Spencer’s house was a majestic artform rather than the sort of corporal punishment it was treated as at the Ross’s, but also because there were enough people around the dinner table that it went mostly unnoticed if Ryan didn’t speak for long periods of time. The Smiths, as usual, went out of their way to be nice to him, passing him the tub of sour cream without his asking and occasionally drawing him into the conversation with queries on school, but never pressing. Ryan thought idly how nice it would be to live there, and, predictably, felt guilty as soon as he had thought so.

            Mostly he wanted to get Spencer alone so that they could sneak into the computer room and look up who the hell Pete Wentz was, but Brendon still stayed. He first helped wash dishes, and then just kept not leaving. Once it was late enough that Ryan knew his dad would be worried, Ryan was deeply annoyed and knew he had to wait.

            “Well, I’m going home,” he said sourly. “It’s pretty late. See you at school tomorrow?”

            “See you,” Spencer said, a mirror of disappointment on his face. He wanted to know as well, but there wasn’t much to be done.

            “Oh!” Brendon seemed surprised. “Oh, it is late. Um. I guess I should go too.”

            “I didn’t see your car,” Ryan said.

            “I walked,” Brendon said. Ryan could feel an enormous sigh building in his chest, but he suppressed it. Spencer had better be proud of him, he thought.

            “Would you like a ride?” Ryan asked. He had been getting less and less patient and friendly as the night wore on, so he must have sounded borderline murderous. It was therefore a testament to how badly Brendon must have wanted a ride that he nodded eagerly.

            “Super,” Ryan said, voice thick with sarcasm. “Later, man. Thanks for dinner!” he called over his shoulder. He walked out, letting Brendon trail behind him.

            “You have your own car,” Brendon said, which seemed sort of redundant, as Ryan was giving him a ride.

            “My granddad’s,” Ryan offered up. “He bought it new and got put in a home five years later.”

            “Oh,” Brendon said. “I’m sorry.”

            “I’m not,” Ryan said. “He was a racist bastard, but hey, not even a hundred thousand miles on Matilda.”

            “You… named your car?”

            “Lots of people name their cars.”

            “Yeah, but…” Brendon made a face. “You just don’t seem like the type.”

            “What type is that?” Ryan asked, but not quite loud enough for Brendon to hear. Brendon sat down in Spencer’s designated spot, and Ryan gunned it out of the cul-de-sac, letting the tires screech even though Matilda was a Toyota and it wasn’t that impressive at all.

            “Where do you live?” Ryan asked. He glanced over at Brendon and made a face. “Put your seatbelt on.”

            Brendon complied, looking embarrassed already. “Way up North,” he said. “By Red Rock.”

            Ryan raised his eyebrows. “That’s a hell of a walk.”

            “Well,” Brendon shrugged. “We can’t all get cars from our dead grandparents.”

            Ryan fought back a smile.

            “He’s not dead yet, jackass.”

            Brendon laughed, a little nervously, but still a laugh. Be nice, be nice, Ryan was going to be nice if it killed him.

            It was nearly eleven when Ryan dropped Brendon off in front his house, one three stories tall and absolutely indistinguishable from those around it. Brendon waved, but as soon as the door shut Ryan took off, not waiting to see if he got inside. He was so, so late, and though he didn’t have a curfew, Ryan knew his dad.

            There was a light on in the living room window when Ryan pulled up, but that could have meant anything. Ryan’s dad wasn’t especially dependable, so he might have waited up to give Ryan a lecture, or he might have tried and passed out in the living room. Either way, Ryan squared his shoulders before walking in, guiltier than he was nervous.

            George Ross was only half-asleep, his eyelids hanging low and the beer bottle in his hand swaying dangerously. Ryan let the door thud shut to announce his presence, then said: “Hey.”

            “Hey, kid.” His dad did not look up. His eyes were fixed on the TV, but he did tighten his grip on the bottle and sit up a little straighter. “Kinda late, isn’t it?”

            “Yeah, sorry,” Ryan said. He hung his keys on the hook by the door and sat down next to his dad on the couch. “There’s a new guy in the band, so I drove him home tonight.”

            “Does he live in Reno?” his dad asked, but there was a hint of a smile playing at the corner of his lips, so Ryan laughed softly. The TV was so low he could hardly hear it, but his dad left the captions on. Some baseball game.

            “Good day at work?” Ryan asked.

            “Not bad,” his dad said. Ryan doubted that, just based on the number of bottles in the wicker trash can next to the couch, but he didn’t press. “School?”

            “Same as ever,” Ryan said. He waited another minute, and another, and looked at the TV without watching it until he was certain by the commercial cycle that more than fifteen arduous minutes had gone by before he stood up.

            “I should get to bed,” Ryan said. “Night, Dad.”

            “Night, squirt,” his dad said.

            If his dad had already been in bed, Ryan would’ve called the extension that went straight to the phone in Spencer’s room, but he was still awake, and Ryan already felt guilty enough for not spending more time with him. For not being home. Such an outright rejection would feel too mean for him to manage.

            Ryan didn’t know when the chasm between him and his dad had started opening, when it had started getting bad, or when they had stopped being able to talk to each other, but he despised it. And yet, he didn’t know how to speak to him anymore. It was like they lived on separate planets, drifting close to one another but never touching. The sensation was overwhelmingly lonely.

            So, unable to call Spencer, too keyed up for homework, and out of motivation to talk to his dad, Ryan figured it was time to bite the proverbial bullet. He laid down in bed, closed his eyes, and waited to be swept up in images from somewhere else.

            Most of the night, Ryan dreamt the full story of the four he had seen earlier. From the vampire biting Patrick, he learned his name was, to the group of them crashing into sleep in some girl’s basement. (A girl which, after briefly inhabiting, Ryan knew was very much hoping to sleep with the bassist. It seemed a reasonable hope and a likely future from what Ryan gleaned about the group of them.) Mostly, it just made sense of the jumble of images Ryan had seen earlier, but he did also get the name of the band this time, _Fall Out Boy_ , which struck him as a bit of a stupid band name, but which he remembered for research purposes. Once the oracle in his brain seemed satisfied that he had the whole story from this band, it moved on to show him other things. He could not drive his dreams of the future, but these did not have the frenetic pace of dreams uncontrolled. He drifted, from the war in Afghanistan to a group of teenagers in Australia hiding a body back to the boy.

            Seeing him again his dreams, Ryan still couldn’t tell whether this was Brendon. He looked so much more graceful in the dim light of dreams, but still. It was a close resemblance, if nothing else. But Ryan was tired (how could he be tired while he was sleeping? He didn’t know, he simply was) and he didn’t want to puzzle over it. Instead, he let the sound of the boy’s singing soothe him until his dreams faded to nothing.

 

            Ryan woke early the next morning, early enough call Spencer and offer to drive him to school, and early enough to realize that Brendon had left his guitar in Ryan’s backseat, which was exceptionally annoying. Like doing one nice thing required Ryan to do a dozen more. A great reason, he thought, to never be nice again.

            After taking a great deal of time picking over his breakfast, Ryan discovered that it was still too early to go pick up Spencer, but that there wasn’t enough time to try and drop of Brendon’s guitar (and more to the point, he wouldn’t want to on the off chance that someone in Brendon’s family answered the door.) Impulsively, he drove to a twenty-four-hour record store, walking straight up to the counter without checking the shelves. He had seen the recording studio, so he doubted they were stocked locally.

            “Can I help you?” the clerk asked. A college boy, with a carefully manicured superior and bored out of his mind look that Ryan recognized in most college students. Another breed of people that he detested.

            “I’m guessing you don’t carry Fall Out Boy?” Ryan asked. The clerk looked affronted.

            “Have you checked?” he asked.

            “No,” Ryan said. “Do you?”

            “Let me go look for you,” the clerk said, glaring at Ryan. He walked out from behind the counter, glanced around the Fs, and came back empty handed.

            “Right, like I said,” Ryan said. “So can I, like, request some of their stuff?”

            “Do you know what label they’re with?” the clerk asked.

            “No,” Ryan said. “I know that they’re Chicago based. My cousin played me some. It’s good. They’re really big in the midwest.”

            “I’ll see what I can do,” he said. “Come back in a week.”

            Ryan smiled without thanking him and took off towards Spencer’s house.

            “What happened last night?” Spencer asked as soon as they were both in the car.

            “Vampire attack,” Ryan said. “But not exactly? It was super weird. My head just kept dragging me back to some magic band in Wisconsin or some shit.”

            “Friends of Green Day?” Spencer asked.

            “Nah, they’re nobody,” Ryan said. “Or, I think they’re nobody, anyway. I wanted to use your computer last night, but the freaking new guy.”

            “I like him,” Spencer said mildly. “He’s enthusiastic. He could be the sunshine that balances out your… equally sunny disposition.”

            Ryan took one hand off the steering wheel to flip Spencer off.

            “He’s weird,” Ryan said.

            “Pot, kettle,” Spencer replied.

            “I’ll give him a chance,” Ryan grumbled. “He could learn to take a hint, though.”

            “Begging him to leave with your eyes isn’t giving him a chance,” Spencer said. “What about the band is so weird?”

            “I don’t know,” Ryan said. He mashed his hand against the steering wheel  in frustration. “Seems like I don’t know much of anything these days, though.” Before Spencer could try and cheer him up or something equally humiliating, he pressed on. “Anyways, I just get the vibe that they’re important. Usually my head’s not so insistent about showing me something. This was different. Oh, and it was weird because the vampire attack was a vampire in the band attacking a human in the band, and then they made up and fought a wendigo together.”

            “Wendigo?” Spencer said. Ryan couldn’t begrudge him this. Spencer loved the magic, longed for it in a way that Ryan didn’t understand but thought was fantastic anyway. He just adored magic, hung on every word Ryan gave him. It was probably giving Ryan a big head.

            “Yeah, she was impersonating a waitress and had like, massacred the whole diner,” Ryan said. It had actually been horrifying to see it from the bands point of view, but he liked telling stories. Hell, he loved telling stories. “She dragged them to the back where she had hung up all the bodies of the other workers and was bleeding them.”

            Spencer said nothing, but raised his eyebrows.

            “Anyway, they all like, lived and everything, the band, but it was hardcore. She had them strung up and the vampire had to rip apart the bonds to kill her.”

            Spencer didn’t reply, just looked awestruck.

            “Anyway,” Ryan said again, “It was way better than the vision of Father Merrin. I’ve felt something kinda pulling at me, but I’ve been trying to avoid it, in case it’s him.”

            “Don’t you wanna know how it happened?” Spencer asked.

            “Not really,” Ryan said after a pause. “I mean, fuck, I don’t want him to die or anything but. I don’t know. There was something really wrong about that vision.”

            “Wrong how?” Spencer asked. Ryan swung into his usual parking space, in the very back of the lot at the Walgreens a few blocks from their school. He turned the car off and got out without answering, then finally sighed and said:

            “I don’t know. I mean, I do, but. Whoever killed Father Merrin could see me. LIke, could see me having the vision. They spoke to me.”

            “That doesn’t make any sense,” Spencer said. “What do you mean they saw you? Are you going to be there?”

            “I don’t have any fucking intentions of being there,” Ryan said, but that did give him a nasty thought. Perhaps he was going to be there. That would explain why he could see it from his own point of view. The thought was stomach dropping, and he pushed it away.

            “Are you going to tell him he’s in danger?” Spencer asked. They were walking fairly briskly to the campus, Ryan doing his tie while walking. Spencer still had to do his in front of a mirror, but Ryan could tie his tie in his sleep.

            “Hell fucking nope,” Ryan said. “How would I even approach that? ‘Hey, Father, you’ve been a religious inspiration for years, but you need to know that everything you know about the world is wrong, I’m a witch, and you’re gonna die between now and your next haircut.’”

            “It was just a suggestion.”

            “I know, it’s just. It doesn’t really matter, does it? These aren’t the kind of visions I can stop.” Ryan sighed.

            “Guess it’s just a question of whether or not you think he’d want to know,” Spencer said.

            “Who the fuck would want to know that?” Ryan asked.

            “Mr. Ross!”

            Ryan snapped to attention. On school grounds he held himself a little straighter, stiff backed and orderly. He was more careful there. And he tried not to be caught with his guard down.

            “Language, Ryan,” the teacher cautioned. His old English teacher smiled fondly at him, and he tried not to exhale audibly. Nothing bad, nothing yet. Ryan was dreading seeing Father Merrin again, but perhaps just for today he could avoid him…

            “I think I’m gonna ask Haley out,” Spencer announced. “Do you think that’s a good idea?”

            “You, wait, who?”

            “Haley,” Spencer said. He paused. “She has been sitting at our lunch table for four months now.”

            “Right,” Ryan said, though the name still didn't sound familiar. “Um. Good for you, man. And, uh, good luck?”

            “You're a great friend, Ry,” Spencer said. He rolled his eyes, though, the Spencer equivalent of saying all was forgiven. The first bell rang, and Spencer gripped Ryan's wrist for a moment.

            “Call me if you need me?” he said. Ryan nodded and walked to class, alone.

            Ryan didn’t talk to many people throughout the day. He wasn’t close to most people he went to school with, only friends with Spencer and acquaintances with long term lab partners. The school days passed in a blur. An annoyingly long blur.

            The thing was that it wasn’t always bad. Ryan didn’t like being alone, but at the same time he didn’t think he was lonely. Being alone was his default state. But some days, he felt a hollowness that he wondered if, perhaps, might have something to do with being alone.

            That morning Ryan felt this hollowness to be especially stinging. Spencer was going to ask a girl out.

            _Spencer was going to leave him_.

            No, that was ridiculous. Ryan wasn’t going to be some annoying, clingy best friend. It was good that Spencer was branching out and making more friends, even if Ryan had no intentions of doing the same. He would be a supportive best friend, he thought. Perhaps he was a bit jealous, but he knew it would do no good to take it out on this Haley person. Spencer was pragmatic to the core, and Ryan was _not_ getting replaced.

            Since seniors had off campus lunch but sitting by himself in a fast food place was depressing even for Ryan, he usually got Taco Bell for the table. He thought it was just he and Spencer eating it, but we pretty much exclusively bought group sized platters, and girls didn’t usually eat that much, right? Possibly he’d been buying Spencer’s future girlfriend lunch for months and just never noticed.

            As a peace offering, when he was going through the drive-thru he ordered three Baha-Blasts as opposed to the usual two (or one, if he was feeling particularly pissed at Spencer for one reason or another.) He was given a carrying container, which looked a lot more suspicious than just a soda in each hand a backpack stuffed with tacos, but he accepted it with poor grace and drove an extra few times around the block, dreading going back to school and talking to someone else. Two new people in as many days was far too much, though he supposed that this haley person wasn’t actually new. She may as well have been.

            Ryan bent against the wind as he walked the rest of the distance back to the high school, head still busy. He had to get Brendon’s number from Spencer and call him about the guitar- or, better, get Spencer to call him about the guitar. But he’d probably have to be the one to drop it off, which made the whole thing even less appealing. He doubted Brendon in his ratty converse who walked all across Summerlin for band practice had the means to pick his guitar up, and Ryan didn’t really want to interact with whoever else lived in the big Mormon household.

            He was so lost in his thoughts as he walked that he nearly knocked over the street preacher, spilling soda all over the ground. _So much for that._

            Soda seeping into his shirt, Ryan looked up and squinted at the too bright sight of a man in a suit backlit by the afternoon sun. It was freezing out, but none of the drinks managed to get onto Suit Guy, who was smiling a toothpaste-commercial smile at Ryan.

            “Hey! Didn’t see you there, sonny!”

            If Stepford made men, that would be what this guy was. A husband from the 1950’s, with perfect hair and teeth and lightly tan skin, wearing a three-piece suit in the middle of the day in an otherwise abandoned high school parking lot.

            “Me either,” Ryan mumbled, shifting his backpack on his back. Soda and ice were still burbling out onto the asphalt, washing cold waves over Ryan’s shoes. The man nodded and held aloft a suspiciously familiar black book.

            “Have you heard the good news?” he asked.

            Ryan stared at him, then at the school, then back at him.

            “Is that a joke?” he asked.

            Suit Guy seemed impervious to Ryan’s rudeness, only smiling wider.

            “You’re a student! Wonderful! You can show my son, Adam, around.”

            Seemingly from thin air, or maybe Ryan just couldn’t see from how he had to squint in the sunlight, Suit Guy pushed forward a miniature version of himself. The kid was, thankfully, not wearing a full suit, but he was already dressed in the school uniform, tie and all, and he looked equally Stepford with his too-bright eyes and too-white smile.

            “Adam,” he said, stretching his hand out. Ryan took his hand mostly out of shock rather than desire to meet Adam, and the second their hands met the voice in Ryan’s head hissed: “ _Heretic_!”

            Ryan froze, but let his hand be shook by Adam. His grip was firm around Ryan’s lifeless, soda-soaked hand.

            “Ryan,” he said numbly.

            “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Ryan,” Adam said, leaning in too close on the word “pleasure.” His father’s hand rested on the small of his back, like he was steering him.

            “Do you think you could-?” the father began, and Ryan interrupted immediately with:

            “I have to go.”

            His phone chirped as he walked into school, the screen lit up with an unknown number.

            **_do u hav my guitar?_**

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Look at me! Posting kind of regularly! And also finally having a plot for this story, lol. Hope you guys liked it! Tell me what you think and thanks for reading!


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Life goes on, but not so much as ever.

            Nobody but Ryan missed the Baja Blast. Spencer said that Ryan “always had shitty taste in soda anyway,” and then in a quieter voice said that he had a spare shirt in his locker. Ryan made an assenting noise in his throat and nodded at Haley. She didn’t seem to notice him, but that was normal for Ryan. He slumped down in his chair and texted Brendon, trying to ignore the shivers that ran through his chest from the soda spilled all over him.

            **_yeah, it’s in my car. Want me to drop it off?_**

            “So,” Spencer said, looking so hopeful Ryan felt blinded by the light of looking at him. “I was wondering if you wanted to go out sometime?” Ryan slumped a little bit lower. He smelled like sugar and sweat and artificial lime.

            “Me?” Haley looked stunned. She was a little mousy, but she couldn’t have been that shocked. “Um- sure- when did you-?”

            “Anytime!” Spencer said. Ryan sincerely doubted that he had a day in mind. Or a date, for that matter.

            **_no no just brng it to practice?_**

            Ryan wanted push and say it wasn’t a big deal, but he wasn’t going to force his kindness on someone uninterested in it.

            **_kk_.**

            Spencer and Haley were both trying hard not to smile, so sweet it made Ryan's stomach hurt. A couple of other people were sitting at their table, quiet hockey players and a nerdy band girl that was probably Haley's friend, but Ryan was really interested in striking up a conversation with anyone who wasn't Spencer, and Spencer was busy. Ryan instead spent most of lunch sulking, half interested in chewing his food and half focused on the slow movement of the second hand round and round the clock. Going to class was almost a blessing, until he walking into the biology lab and saw Adam sitting at one of the rectangular black lab tables. _Ryan's_ lab table, that he was very used to sitting at alone. There was an odd number of people in the class which meant that Ryan could get away with sitting alone. And now the new kid was here. The heretic.

            How easy life without magic must be, Ryan thought.

            Adam jumped up when he saw Ryan walking towards him, broad grin on his face.

            “Hello there,” he said. “Ryan, right?”

            Ryan hadn't remembered giving Adam his name, but he tried, unsuccessfully, to school his face into a smile for a moment.

            “Yeah,” he said at last. “Adam, yeah?”

            Ryan sat down at the lab table without waiting for an answer. He pulled out a book- he didn’t look at what book, it could’ve been the copy of _Survivor_ he brought to school with him or it could have been a math textbook- and opened it to read, but Adam was persistent.

            “That’s me,” he agreed. He had an amicable voice, but wheedling. It reminded Ryan forcefully of politicians, and didn’t really warm him to the guy. “I heard this was the only open seat in the classroom. You unpopular, or just lucky?”

            Ryan glanced up at him. He was in just a bad enough mood to feel combative.

            “I was lucky,” he said. Adam laughed.

            “It’s okay,” he said. “I keep to myself, for the most part.”

            Ryan nodded, and didn’t look up from his book. Adam leaned over and read over the top of Ryan’s shoulder for a minute. The sensation was skin-crawling.

            Class took forever to start, and the teacher was so thrilled to see Ryan “making a friend” that he congratulated him in front of the class. Rather than attempt to correct him, Ryan bent over his lab journal, scribbling furiously into the margins. It was even a lab day, so he and Adam had to pair up on a project. The overwhelming urge to just keep staring at the second hand of the clock got worse and worse.

            “This isn't so bad,” Adam said. Ryan thought of the word _jovial_ when he looked at Adam, a word he'd never before seen outside of British literature. It seemed the kind of word that went hand in hand with descriptions of ruddy cheeks, but it also fit Adam. He was friendly and pompous and Ryan missed Spencer with stupid fervency.

            “Transpiration, I mean, it's pretty easy. Don't know how we're expected to get adequate results in 45 minutes, but I'm guessing you get higher grades than anyone else in this class anyway, huh?”

            “Not really,” Ryan admitted. “Pretty high, but I'm not the best.”

            “Yeah? What's to stop you from being valedictorian?”

            Ryan almost cracked a smile, but resisted.

            “I miss a lot of school, and I never do my homework,” he said.

            “Bet you don't eat green vegetables either,” Adam teased. To Ryan's shock, he did let out a snort.

            “Not if I can avoid it, no,” Ryan said. “So, okay, you tape down the flower, I'll write the measurements every five minutes.”

            “I feel like I'm getting the short end of the quickly withering leaf here,” Adam said, waving their plant cutting around.

            Ryan raised his eyebrows. “Call for help if you need it, then.”

            Adam was good at biology, which was another mercy. He said something about having done a lab like that before when Ryan asked, and even though they ran up until the bell rang, their paper was the most filled out, and their plant had cooperated and best displayed transpiration under not the best of circumstances.

            By the end of class, if Ryan wasn't quite over his childish despair over Spencer liking someone else, he was thoroughly distracted from it. Adam made for a pretty good partner, and didn’t bother Ryan with nonstop chatter like some of the girls did if their partner was sick. All in all, it wasn’t the worst day of Ryan’s life.

            Which really made it all the more disappointing when Ryan got home to see a tour bus in front of it.

            For the past few years, there hadn’t been many people going to Ryan for help. He hadn’t paid too much attention to the politics, but he knew that monster hunting had sort of… died out. The monsters weren’t really getting worse, not in a way that other people would notice, but they were definitely around more often. Ryan supposed he should have been happy that someone was back to start dealing with this kind of thing again, but he mostly felt hollow. It had been a long enough day already without this.

            Ryan shouldered the front door open, waiting for the band to approach him, but he stopped in the door when he realized that the rock band was already inside. Ryan couldn’t make sense of the four tattooed strangers sitting on his couch without him having invited them in until he saw his dad on his usual armchair. His dad glanced up at him, gave him an indecipherable warning glance, and turned back to the band.

            “Who’s the kid?” a blonde man asked, barely glancing at Ryan.

            “My son,” his dad said. “In any case, I think we’re done here. If the two of you combine, the pack can be one with two alphas. It’s going to work out.”

            The men stood up, pushing past Ryan to the front door, apparently oblivious to him. The last one lingered for a moment and looked Ryan up and down.

            “The oracle thing, that hereditary?” he asked.

            “I wouldn’t worry about it,” Ryan’s dad said. The man left, the door swinging shut behind him.

            “Dad?” Ryan said. “Um, why did you tell Metallica that you’re the oracle?”

            “Yes,” his dad said. He pulled himself slowly to his feet, straining under the effort of standing. He too walked past Ryan, but into the kitchen rather than outside. He poured himself a drink using one of the rarely touched bottles of liquor stashed on top of the fridge then walked back into the living room. Ryan's father didn't have a tendency to rush whatever he planned on saying.

            “Why?” Ryan asked when he finally sat back down. “I mean… are they dangerous or something?”

            His dad looked very far away, though he was sitting on the chair right next to him. His eyes were open in the distant, unseeing way that Ryan had grown used to in himself, in losing track of the world when he saw too far away.

            “You're eighteen,” his father said. His voice came out slow and thick as though he were already drunk. “Eighteen, off to college soon, to a good life. A better life than I had.

            “I let you take over when you were too young. It was my weakness, my fault, and I'm sorry for all you had to see. But I don't want you to have to suffer through this position. I don't want you to get tangled up in magic. It's too dangerous. Bands coming here to inspire their quests is one thing, but you can't… can't just go out into the world… all vulnerable.”

            “Dad,” Ryan said. “You're not making sense. I am the Oracle. I am part of the magic. You can't just decide I'm not.”

            George Ross stared up at Ryan, his eyes suddenly very clear and afraid. Ryan took a step closer to him, across the dark cavern of the living room, but his dad held up his hands.

            “I can't decide for you,” he acquiesced. “But you should do your best to live a normal life. I still see the future, see enough to know what's coming. I can take care of any duties that require an Oracle. You should get a chance to live.”

            “Dad,” Ryan hovered a few feet from his dad's chair. The theatrics of all, the dark room and the heavy voice, it grated at Ryan. “Dad, I'm fine. And I have a condition where sometimes I pass out because I have visions, so it's not as though I can turn this off.”

            “I'm not asking you to stop seeing the future,” his dad said. “I'm just saying that your own life matters too. School, college, hockey, that's all more important than the magic you see. Don't let the magic become your life. I don't think I've taught you that enough. I don't think I've taught you enough at all.”

            Even though it was balmy outside and warm inside, dry and cozy with the A/C off for the season, Ryan felt suddenly very cold.

            “Dad,” he said. “Did you see something… bad?”

            His dad wouldn't meet his eyes, and instead gulped down the dark brown liquor in the bottom of his glass. He stared first at Ryan's feet, then out the window.

            “Just be careful,” he said.

 

            When Ryan laid down in bed that night, he found he couldn't sleep. His eyes were closed but his mind wouldn't stop racing, flitting through images of other people's futures that he'd tried to avoid seeing during the day, to focus on other things. The broken handle of a wagon and blood spread across a suburban street, a boy kicking a soccer ball while smoke billowed out of a small, thatched house behind him, a woman with her eyes closed and a bottle in her hand, a few fractured seconds of music through a car radio. Death, pain, joy, loss, the weightless sensation of sudden and complete change. Ryan was there to feel and see it all.

            What his dad didn't seem to understand was this: Ryan did try to keep out the visions, as much as was physically possible. But he couldn’t fight it. The world, the oracle, whatever it was, it had stories that it wanted to show Ryan, and Ryan wasn’t allowed to not see them.

            At first the visions were quick and random. Sometimes he would stay in a person’s mind long enough to here a few words shouted, other times just long enough to see a flash of color. But then they started to slow down. He got a few moments in the back of a van, his head nestled in the crook of someone else’s neck as the vehicle jostled down a bumpy highway, a low voice in the front seat asking when they would get back to Chicago. He paused in a nightclub with flashing lights and screaming twenty somethings, his hand throbbing as he strummed out a basic rhythm line, casting nervous glances to his side at a singer who looked like he was barely standing up straight. Then he was in a bedroom, the same bedroom he’d seen his whole life, where the boy sat, head pressed against the window. He was half-singing, half-whispering, the words coming out slow and hoarse, but still lovely. Ryan knew he wouldn’t remember the tune when he woke up, but he enjoyed it then, and tried to step forward. The boy looked so sad, so unlike the hyperactive creature that had come to band practice that they had to be different, and Ryan yearned to comfort him.

            “Little voyeur, aren’t you?” a husky voice enveloped Ryan. He turned, but there was nothing behind him but the pale beige wall. The boy kept whisper-singing his mournful song, unable to hear the voice Ryan heard.

            “What do you see in him? What do you think he’ll see in you? No one will be able to save you, little fortune teller. You have no future.”

            The room faded to black like an image with ink poured over it. Ryan opened his mouth to shout, and his mouth filled with the same inky black water, tasting like iron on his tongue. He was drowning, the boy was gone, and Ryan couldn’t breathe and no one could see him but this thing could see him heretic heretic-

            Ryan sat bolt upright in bed, coughing and gasping for air. The lights were out, but through the dim street light coming through his window he could faintly see sticky, black phlegm pooling on his bedsheets. He swiped his hand across his mouth, and his palm came back streaked with black.

            This, Ryan thought, was not the sort of oracle business his father had prepared him for.

 

            The week dragged on like always. School and hockey and TV and jerking off and spending an awful lot of time not thinking about Brendon. The only difference between that week and the one before it was who Ryan was spending time with.

            Overnight, Spencer and Haley had become inseparable. Though Ryan had barely even known the girl before, he now couldn’t find Spencer without seeing their fingers twined together. And Ryan was happy for them, he really was, except for the fact that he resented her deeply and missed his best friend.

            But Adam was nice. He remembered the strange warning, but wondered if that might not have been for Adam’s father. Because the thing was, Adam was great. He easily fit in at their lunch table, and was up for all of Ryan’s dark jokes. Ryan lent him a copy of Diary, by Chuck Palahniuk, and Adam read it in a night and referenced it back to Ryan. He was working on Invisible Monsters, after that. He was no Spencer, but he was… tolerant. Tolerant was often the best Ryan, weirdo, bad at talking, faints-in-class Ryan, could ask for of his friends.

            During lunch the two of them sat with their heads bent together. They only shared Biology the first day, but Adam seemed to still be working out his calendar at school, so by the end of the week he was in almost every class with Ryan, which made Ryan’s life easier. They went over homework, Ryan helping Adam with his English Lit, and Adam breezing through both of their math.

            “I’m really not sure how you made it to eighteen without learning this,” Adam said at lunch one day, passing a paper back to Ryan. Adam copied his handwriting flawlessly, so it looked like Ryan had done all the work.

            “I’ve got better things to do than learn linear algebra. You could pick up a book from time to time.”

            The sort of playful jabs they had going made Spencer cast them a concerned look from time to time, but he was usually a little busy to notice. Adam threw his empty Gatorade bottle at Ryan’s head each day when he finished. Ryan had all but decided he liked him. Adam seemed determined to treat him like any other guy, and Ryan couldn’t get enough of it.

            Meanwhile, he kept dreaming about the boy, who may or may not have been Brendon. He didn’t think it was, because real Brendon was annoying and the boy in Ryan’s dreams was, in a word, ethereal, but they looked pretty similar. Pretty gorgeous, too, but Ryan wasn’t really ready to deal with that.

            A week passed in what felt like the blink of an eye, and after another sleepless night, Ryan called Spencer to confirm he was picking him up, then dropped by the downtown music shop again.

            “My CD come in?” Ryan yelled even as the bell was still ringing with the door opening. Without response, he walked to the register in the back of the shop and rang the bell on the counter. Annoyed looking college boy came out of the back and scowled when he saw Ryan.

            “Ah, the kid with the shit taste in music,” the clerk said. “Yeah, your CD came. I don’t know why you want this stuff. It’s like Blink 182 for sad homos.”

            Ryan glanced at the pink-yellow cover and the strangely familiar faces, warped by plastic.

            “That’s the right band,” he said.

            “You said they were big in Chicago?” the clerk asked, dubious.

            “Yup,” Ryan lied. He had no idea if they were big, per se. They were in a real recording studio in his visions, sure, but their van looked like it was going to rust apart. “How much?”

            “Fifteen for the one, but I’ll give you a wholesale deal if you just buy the box. I don’t need to waste the shelf-space.”

            “Just the one, thanks,” Ryan said.

            He put the CD in his car immediately, listening as he drove the familiar route to Spencer’s house. It wasn’t amazing, but he sort of liked it. Then again, Ryan thought, as it moved to yet another track he nodded his head along to, Blink 182 for sad homos sounded exactly like the kind of music he would be into.

            The car was shaking with the music when Spencer got in, eyebrows raised. Ryan turned down the volume knob and shot away from the curb as soon as the door shut. Spencer gestured to the radio.

            “What’s up with this?” he asked.

            “Fall Out Boy,” Ryan said. “They keep showing up in my dreams, so I decided to just buy the damn album.”

            “They’re no Green Day,” Spencer said.

            “Who is?” Ryan asked.

            “Are they the ones with the wendigo, and the vampire and stuff?” Spencer asked.

            “Yeah, that’s them,” Ryan said.

            They drove in silence for a minute, while a boy’s voice filled the car, singing about long van rides.

            “It’s alright,” Spencer said.

 

            Ryan drove Spencer back to his house after school, so the two of them hung out there waiting for Brent and Brendon to show up. In the interim, Spencer talked about Haley.

            “She’s so cool, dude, we’ve got to all hang out sometime,” he said. “She’s planning on going to college for astronomy, and she likes all our kind of music, and she like, reads poetry and stuff, she’s the best.”

            “You’re gushing,” Ryan said. “We have a rule about gushing about girls.”

            “Dickhead.”

            Realistically, the two of them could have been actually practicing their instruments, but they were instead lying on the floor in Spencer’s bedroom, staring at the ceiling while they caught up. Ryan missed him, and they still ate lunch together every day. He was starting to wonder if this qualified as codependent, or if he was just needy.

            “What about you?” Spencer asked. “Any girls?”

            _A boy_.

            “No one,” Ryan said. “Um. Metallica came to my house, and my dad said he was the oracle. Said he doesn’t want that life for me, or some shit like that. And I’ve been having weird nightmares. Jason, our goalie, he’s been acting like a massive dick. But pretty much everything’s been the same with me, just a little lonelier.”

            “Jealous?” Spencer asked teasingly.

            “You wish,” Ryan said.

            “Yeah, well what about the weird new kid?” Spencer asked.

            “Adam?” Ryan shook his head, though Spencer couldn’t see. “I don’t know. He rubbed me the wrong way at first, but he’s nice enough.”

            “Nice,” Spencer scoffed.

            “For me,” Ryan admitted.

            “You never told me all the details about the Fall Out Boy stuff you’d been seeing,” Spencer said. “What’s up with that?”

            Ryan detailed the events- the blood, the horror, the band made up of mythical creatures, and had just gotten to their return to Chicago when the doorbell rang. Ryan scowled.

            “Brendon rings the doorbell?”

            “He’s polite; don’t be a jackass,” Spencer warned. Ryan’s heart stuttered against his will. It was Brendon and he was something, he just didn’t know what. Ryan stayed on the floor a second too long, so he knew it would be weird to get up and follow Spencer to the door. Instead he stood and hovered by his bedroom door, feeling his palms begin to sweat at the idea of seeing Brendon again. Stupid, he told himself, because he didn’t even know if this was actually the one, the dream boy, but. But.

            “Hey, Ryan!” Brendon said cheerfully. He nearly knocked Ryan over with a zealous wave. “Sorry- is my guitar-?”

            “In my car,” Ryan said. “I can go get it, meet you guys in the garage.”

            “Cool,” Brendon said. His whole body sagged with relief when he said it, and Ryan felt another tick of annoyance. If he missed it so badly, why hadn’t he just let Ryan drop it off, even if he did live way on the north side of town.

            Brendon began tuning his guitar and plucking out chords at random as soon as it was back in his hands. Ryan tuned his guitar too, just trying to listen to it and hope for the best rather than drag a tuner out with him. He felt a little inadequate next to Brendon looking all serious next to him, but it was also hard to focus on tuning with Brendon _sitting right next to him_.

            Brent showed up late, as was his custom, but once they got into practicing, it kind of sounded good. Or, at the very least, good-adjacent. Ryan sounded “a little more Tom than Mark” according to Brent, and even when all of them individually played their parts well, they couldn’t stay in time with one another for more than a minute or so of a song at a time. But it was something approaching good, and Ryan had the most curious sensation that it had to be because of Brendon. He wasn’t doing much-- just playing mediocre rhythm guitar, like Ryan wanted. But the vibe felt different, a little more serious, a little more intense. With every song they performed, Brendon stood a little closer to Ryan, like he was getting less scared of him. Or maybe like he was trying to make Ryan less scared of him, like Ryan was some kind of skittish animal, but Ryan preferred to think it was the first.

            Ryan was about to suggest (or, about to start working himself up to suggest) that they maybe start talking about writing original songs, maybe even look at something he’d started writing on his own, when he felt a throb behind his eyes.

            “Spence?” Ryan said vaguely. Spencer’s head snapped up, recognizing the tone, and he stood up immediately. Ryan gripped his guitar tightly praying to any god that was listening that he wouldn’t break it, but then he didn’t fall. He felt the tug, but it wasn’t powerful enough to draw him out of the moment. He stood in place, knees locked.

            “What’s wrong?” Brendon asked, way too close to Ryan. He jumped back, the head of his guitar scuffing the body of Brendon’s with a horrible sound as he did.

            “Nothing,” he half-shouted. “Um. Nothing. Feeling faint.”

            “The Yugoslavian thing?” Brendon said dubiously. “Should we get you a fainting couch?”

            It would have been a funny joke if Spencer had made it, but coming from Brendon - probably not even the dream boy - just grated on Ryan’s nerves.

            “Sure it’ll fit right in with the stage decor,” Ryan said. “I should head home, actually. It’s getting late. You want a ride, Brendon?”

            The full name felt overly formal on his tongue, but they definitely weren’t at a nickname phase of their relationship yet.

            “Actually, he was staying the night,” Spencer said. “Did you wanna stay over too, Ry?”

            Yet another surge of unreasonable jealousy ripped through Ryan. So Spencer had no time for him, but plenty for the new guy?

            “I’m fine,” Ryan said tightly. “I need to get home.” He gave Spencer a look as if to emphasize what Spencer should know intuitively- that Ryan was just barely fighting off a vision, was probably about to see something life changing, but Spencer just nodded.

            “Call me when you get home?”

            “Sure,” Ryan said. He flipped his guitar around onto his back and all but stormed out to his car. Matilda, at least, was there for him.

            He slammed the driver’s side door shut and took deep breaths. It was a stupid thing to be freaking out about, he knew. It was childish and idiotic but what if? What if he was losing Spencer when Spencer was all he had?

            The throbbing behind his eyes increased in intensity, and Ryan felt his head slam against the steering wheel before he was pulled into something else.

            The room he was in was dark, and once again Ryan wasn’t inhabiting a body, the way he only did when he was seeing (not Brendon) the boy. The details of the room were uncommonly murky, none of the furniture or walls really discernible, but he could see Adam on the floor, convulsing.

            Ryan tried to run to him, but he couldn’t reach Adam. He had no physical presence, he was just watching, and Adam coughed out thick, crimson blood onto his white shirt. Ryan looked around for something, anything to help, but there was nothing, and in any case, this wasn’t happening, but it _would_.

            Ryan jerked back to life, and was shocked to see no time had passed. The vision was really just a flash, but that was enough to draw his attention. He glanced back at Spencer’s house to see if anyone had come out to check on him (wishful thinking) but nothing looked out of the ordinary. There was another car driving into the cul-de-sac, though, so Ryan gunned it, in no mood to get into a conversation about school with Brent’s mom.

            The second he got in the door he yanked the phone off the hook and called Adam. He had his number inscribed in the cover of his Biology textbook, for any homework based emergencies, or in this case, vision-of-murder emergencies.

            “Hello?”

            Adam’s voice sounded cheery and stepford as ever, and Ryan let out a long sigh of relief.

            “Hey, Adam, are you- are you okay?” Ryan asked.

            “Fine, why?” Adam asked.

            “I just,” Ryan paused. He should have said homework, or come up with any other excuse, but he felt so drained, so needy all of a sudden. “Can I come over?”

            He could almost feel the smile through the phone line.

            “I’ll give you my address. My dad’s already asleep.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> kind of a filler chapter but important setup for later! Sorry for the wait aldkfjaslkdfj I'm gonna update this more I swear. Thanks for reading!


	5. The Heretic

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ryan gets to know Adam and Father Merrin a little better, in lieu of spending time with Spencer.

            Adam’s house wasn’t even in Summerlin. It was in Vegas proper, lodged in the liminal space between the airport and the strip, a lone bastion of pale pink stucco and artfully planted palm trees against the desolate waste that all the taxis speeded past, Autobahn style. It didn’t look as intensely suburban as Ryan and Spencer’s houses, but instead looked very typically Vegas. And very, very expensive.

            Ryan’s hand hovered in front of the door for a second, unsure whether or not he should knock. Adam had said his dad was asleep, so maybe knocking would wake his dad up…

            The problem was solved by Adam swinging the door open before Ryan could knock. He positively beamed.

            “Come on in,” he said. Clearly loud enough that Ryan didn’t have to worry about the noise.

            The house inside was just as spotless as it was outside. The neat landscaping outside turned into non-confrontational beige inside, with all new sofas and end tables and trendy looking lamps.

            “Your house looks… nice,” Ryan said at length. Adam rolled his eyes as he fell onto the arm of the off-white sofa with easy grace.

            “Yeah, my dad sent the decorator ahead of us,” he said, his voice full of derision. “He likes every place we live to look like the very highest end of middle class.”

            “How many places do you live?” Ryan asked. He sat gingerly in a chair facing the sofa, feeling like somehow he would dirty up all the slightly-darker-than-white furniture.

            “All over,” Adam shrugged. “Dad travels for work. You want a beer?”

            Beer kind of disgusted Ryan, but he was out of his depth, so he nodded. Adam disappeared into a side room and came back within seconds, tossing a cold can to Ryan.

            “Is that why you ended up here?” Ryan asked. Adam cracked his can open and drank deeply before nodding.

            “Yeah, he’s got new business in town,” he said. “He’s never sure how long a case will take, so every time we move we just buy a new house. He says it’s cheaper than renting, plus we never have to worry about a lease.”

            “Must pay a lot,” Ryan said. “Doesn’t moving all the time suck?”

            “Always,” Adam said. He looked truly sad for a second, looking off into the middle distance, then pulled another deep draught. He crunched the empty can in his hand and tossed it into the wastebasket across the room. A pretty impressive shot, but Ryan had used up his store of compliments already that night.

            “Could you stay with your mom?” Ryan asked.

            “No mom,” Adam said. He gave Ryan a hard look, one that was strangely familiar, and Ryan felt somehow smaller. More vulnerable.

            “Hey, me either,” he said.

            “Doesn’t it suck?” Adam said mockingly, but not quite meanly. “Anyway, what brings you here?”

            Ryan laughed, embarrassed. He leaned back against the absurdly clean, absurdly new couch, and rested his head on the heel of his hand. “It’s stupid, really,” he said. “Just… I had a kind of nightmare, I guess.”

            “Yeah?” Adam cocked his head. “At- sorry, were you already in bed at nine?”

            “Kind of a nightmare,” Ryan said. “I just. I just wanted to not be in my house.”

            “I feel that,” Adam said. “Sometimes you just have to get out of your own head. You kind of become someone else when you’re with someone else.”

            “Yeah,” Ryan said. He wanted to say something a bit more intelligent, but found that all he could do was nod.

            Adam laughed, the sound warmer the longer Ryan was there, and the more he drank. Just one beer shouldn’t make him as fuzzy as he felt, but he was having an off day. Or year.

            “So, you wanna sit around talking philosophy all night, or do something else?”

            “What’d you have in mind?” Ryan asked.

            “Got a pool table in the basement,” Adam said. Ryan thought about a grateful smile, but instead just nodded.

            “I’m shit at pool,” he said.

            “It’s fine,” Adam said. “I like winning.”

            He did win most of the games. Ryan generally didn’t keep track as they drank a little, TV blaring in the background. Adam’s dad, wherever he was, must’ve been a pretty heavy sleeper. Based on all the alcohol Ryan saw briefly in the kitchen, he wondered if Adam’s dad slept the way his father did: heavy and intoxicated.

            A few hours into this, Ryan was shocked to see the clock on the wall with both hands pointed to twelve. He watched as Adam sunk the eight-ball into the corner pocket, then stretched as Adam cheered.

            “Hey, thanks for this,” Ryan said. “It was, ah, good getting to be around someone tonight.”

            “He has manners,” Adam said, eyebrows raised. “You’re very welcome, Ryan. I’m gonna drink that in now, because you don’t feel like the kind of guy to thank people often.”

            “Especially not if they act like this,” Ryan said tightly. “I should head home, though.”

            Adam laid his pool cue down on the table and walked over to Ryan, eyebrows knit together in concern.

            “I don’t think so,” he said. “You’ve had a few, and you should probably just crash here.”

            Ryan had, in fact, had two beers, and while drinking and driving wasn’t a spectacular idea, neither was just not going home. He had no desire at all to leave his dad wondering where he was all night long. He had even less desire to drive to school in the same clothes he had worn that day, with Adam in the passenger seat rather than Spencer. There was hanging out and venting, and then there was straight up betrayal.

            Still, wouldn’t it just be a great excuse for his dad to go and drown himself in a vat of whiskey if Ryan died from driving drunk of all things? He ought to stay…

            The voice in Ryan’s head rose again, a soft but insistent hiss in the back of his brain: **_Leave_**.

            “I’m fine,” Ryan said. He took a step back, and his legs and eyesight didn’t waver at all. “I’ll drink a glass of water first if you want, but I need to get back. My dad, he’ll…”

            “It’s not safe,” Adam said. “I can’t let you go-”

            “I promise I’m fine,” Ryan said. He blinked and scanned the future as quick as he could. He would get home, not that he could tell Adam that. “I will call you when I get there, but I’m absolutely leaving.”

            All the light seemed gone from Adam’s eyes.

            “Fine,” he said. “I’ll see you around.”

            The room felt suddenly cold, and Ryan nodded.

            “See you,” he agreed. He hurried up the stairs, still stunned by the chil. The cold sensation followed him outside, where it had dipped to the low fifties or high forties, dry and snappy, the typical Las Vegas winter. He felt too exposed, no houses around Adam’s. Ryan threw himself in Matilda and turned her engine over a few times, cranking the heat though it shouldn’t have been necessary. He was shivering.

            “What about Adam?” he asked out loud. The boy intrigued him, and he didn’t want to die. But he was getting weird vibes from him, in spite of everything. Unmoving, Ryan leaned his forehead against the steering wheel, his eyes closed.

            If he focused hard enough on Adam, on the hard flash of his teeth and the steely glint in his eyes, Ryan could see him still, sitting in the basement. Ryan could see the annoyance draining from his face. The expression on his face was slowly replaced with fear, and he sank down to the plush carpet, head in his hands. He was frightened, and somehow guilty, like he had done something wrong.

            Ryan snapped back into himself and felt an echo of that guilt wash over him. Adam was just worried about Ryan. Another errant thought - maybe Ryan was making a friend. That was such a foreign idea that he had to fight himself from shaking it off. People made friends. People who played pool with you at eleven at night just so you wouldn’t be alone with your thoughts and didn’t want you to drive drunk, they either had to be drinking buddies or friends, and since Ryan and Adam didn’t exactly get smashed in seventh period.

            Friends. It still felt odd, but Ryan smiled a tiny bit to himself as he drove home.

            His dad was gone when he woke up for school, like usual, but there was no note to signal he had noticed anything wrong. Ryan drove to pick Spencer up again, replaying the same Fall Out Boy CD that was already in his car. It wasn’t till he was nearly to Spencer’s house that he realized he hadn’t been plagued by visions of the future all the previous night. Maybe because he had still been buzzed.

            Ryan thought about his dad, about drinking and visions and all the terrible things he saw, and then tried very, very hard to think about anything else. He wasn’t exactly in the mood to develop an addiction before he even got to college.

            Spencer looked kind of pissed when he got in, but Ryan had expected that. He turned off Matilda, leaned back in his seat, and let out a deep breath.

            “Get it all out of your system,” he said at last.

            “You’re being a dick,” Spencer said. “Brendon’s nice, and he’s trying to get you to like him.”

            “He annoys me,” Ryan said. “I didn’t say anything mean to him.”

            “He’s sensitive,” Spencer said.

            “Maybe he shouldn’t be in a rock band,” Ryan said. “I’m trying my best, okay?”

            “No, you’re not,” Spencer said. “I’ve seen you trying your best, and that’s not it. So we’re having a band sleepover.”

            “I’m emasculated and horrified and absolutely not going to do it,” Ryan said.

            “It might be fun,” Spencer said. “Come on. My mom will make cookies. We will watch Fight Club. Or that Romeo and Juliet movie. I’m trying my damndest here.”

            “Swearing is a sin,” Ryan said halfheartedly. “And I already said I was emasculated. We’re not telling new kid about my thing for Baz Luhrmann movies.”

            “I can say I picked it,” Spencer said.

            “You called it the Romeo and Juliet movie, and it’s called Romeo _plus_ Juliet, and I bet you don’t know the main actors in it.”

            “Whatever, dude, it’s Shakespeare with guns and drag queens: does that mean we’re watching Fight Club?”

            “No! It means I am not having a _sleepover_ with the Mormon kid and Brent.”

            “You kind of like Brent.”

            “Kind of,” Ryan grumbled. He started the car up again. Arguing with Spencer would only get worse if he made Spencer late for school. “When are you doing this to me?”

            “Tomorrow,” Spencer said. “You’re a good friend.”

            “Trying my best,” Ryan said. He turned the music up a little bit louder.

            “It gets better the more you listen to it,” Spencer admitted, pointing to the radio.

            “Doesn’t it?” Ryan said.

            They swerved into the student lot three minutes before the homeroom bell rang. Spencer fumbled his tie into some tangle that almost resembled it being properly tied, and Ryan scooped his books into a bag as quick as he could. The two of them sprinted into the building and were running down the same hall when Father Merrin stepped out of one of the classrooms right in front of them.

            They were running too fast. Ryan had just enough time to instinctively shout “SHIT!” before they collided and knocked the priest and themselves to the ground.

            “Mr. Ross! Mr. Smith!”

            The teacher whose room Father Merrin had just left looked beyond scandalized. Ryan opened his mouth to speak, and was promptly interrupted by the shrill screech of the bell ringing. And there went making it to class on time.

            Ryan jumped to his feet and helped the priest up at once. Father Merrin dusted off his robes and gave the two of them an amused look.

            “Morning, boys. I take it you are both deeply eager to be getting to your studies, then?”

            “Something like that,” Ryan said. The priest’s lip twitched, but he didn’t smile.

            “Why don’t you follow me to my office?” he suggested. Spencer’s shoulders hunched, and Ryan felt a wave of guilt roll over him. Maybe it made sense that Spencer was making other friends.

            The three of them walked in silence. Father Merrin didn't like Ryan, Ryan was sure of it, but he hoped that he wouldn't be too hard on Spencer. Still, while Ryan wasn't sure what sort of sin knocking the local priest to his ass was, he was sure it was a serious one.

            Father Merrin’s office lay just off the hall that connected the school to the chapel. The three of them walked through the hallways at a leisurely pace, Spencer occasionally throwing Ryan looks that seemed to be asking for help.

            When they got to the heavy wooden doors, Ryan realized that he had never actually been in Father Merrin's office before. He saw him at chapel, confession, and in the halls, but never in his office. He tried to reach out ahead of time with his mind, but found that his view of the room via the Oracle was strangely blocked. His mind simply refused to let him see it.

            As such, all Ryan had to go on was his imagination, which drew up for him a slightly bigger confessional with a desk in it. He thought of dark wood and dim lights and the smell of incense. Father Merrin’s office was anything but that.

            The room was unexpectedly airy, with big, bright windows and whitewashed walls, visible only through cracks in the many maps hanging on them. There were two low bookcases under the window and a large desk facing the door, two chairs set in front of it. The room was awash in sunlight.

            Ryan and Spencer sat down in front of the desk, and Father Merrin folded his hands on the desk.

            “Running a little late for class?” he said.

            “It was my fault, Father,” Ryan said. “I was driving, and I stopped the car to talk, and I was also late picking him up because I stopped somewhere else first.”

            “I’m not upset,” Father Merrin said. His face was impassive, but Ryan thought that was a hopeful way to begin. “I just wanted to warn you boys not to run in the halls in the future.”

            It seemed a weird, tiny thing to drag them all the way up to his office for, but Ryan nodded along.

            The priest scribbled onto a hall pass and handed it to Spencer.

            “Best get to class, and slow down in the future. It’s better to be tardy than unsafe,” he said.

            The both of them stood up, but Father Merrin held up a hand.

            “Mr. Ross, stay a moment?”

            Ryan met Spencer’s eyes, and Spencer gave him a sympathetic look before walking out. Ryan slowly sat back down, and Father Merrin met Ryan’s eyes with a cold, cutting gaze. His eyes were pale blue and like ice.

            “Mr. Ross,” Father Merrin said. He didn’t lean forward, but he felt closer to Ryan, their connection more intense. “Is there anything you wish to discuss?”

            Adam flashed to Ryan’s mind, as did Brendon. Visions of the future, getting bloodier by the day, and the voice in his head that warned him away from people. Spencer getting distant. His father getting strange. Coughing up black goo in the middle of the night. None of these things were the kind of things he wanted to bring up with his school priest.

            “No,” Ryan said. “Nothing.”

            Father Merrin sat back, his gaze still narrow and focused.

            “You’re a very talented young man, Mr. Ross,” he said. “I understand you were accepted into UNLV?”

            “Yeah,” Ryan said. “I haven’t sent back my acceptance yet, but it looks like that’s where I’ll be going.”

            “And will you continue your religious instruction when you’re attending college as well?” Father Merrin asked. Ryan squirmed in his seat. He didn’t want to lie to a priest.

            “I’m… struggling with my faith a little, Father,” he said. “I’m not sure If it’s something I’ll have time to pursue.”

            “It is vital that you continue to have a relationship with God,” Father Merrin said. “You especially, I fear the world will try to bear down on. You will need the strength of faith in the coming times.”

            “What makes you say that?” Ryan asked, then hastily added, “Father.”

            “I think you know quite well enough,” Father Merrin said. “You of all students, Mr. Ross, must know of the darkness that is coming.”

            Ryan made an effort not to show how startled he was, but his eyes must still have gone wide with surprise. Father Merrin continued to look completely impassive.

            “If ever you decide that you’re ready to come to me,” he said. “I will always be willing to help you.”

            “What darkness is coming?” Ryan asked. “What are you talking about?”

            A moment passed in silence. Father Merrin leaned back. His back was to the window, and so the sun hit him from behind. His face was the only thing in the room obscured in shadows.

            “You aren’t like most of the students here, Mr. Ross,” he said. “You’re not even human. And I know what you are.”

            Ryan jumped to his feet, distantly aware of his hands shaking.

            “I have to get to class, sir,” Ryan said.

            “Sit back down,” Father Merrin said, but Ryan shook his head.

            “We’re taking a test today,” he lied, “I have to go.”

            Ryan sprinted out of the room and down the hall, ducked into a bathroom and gripped one of the sinks with both hands, trying to steady his breathing.

            Someone had finally figured him out. And he had no idea what to do about it.

 

            Rather than risk getting a detention, Ryan stayed in the bathroom for all of first period and went to his second class first. For skipping class, the school just called home, thinking that was a worse punishment than detention. This policy guaranteed that, so long as Ryan was either on time or skipped, no one would know he had done anything wrong. He got home before his dad nine times out of ten and could delete the messages left on their voicemail, and the rare times his father did hear from the school, he shrugged it off as unimportant. Still, he needed to maintain his GPA if he wanted to keep both his college acceptance and his scholarship, so he tried not to ditch too very often.

            Ryan had history second period, the sort of class he could sleep through and still ace. As such, he let his mind wander while the teacher droned on about the industrial revolution.

            Father Merrin knew Ryan was the Oracle. Or, at the very least, suspected that Ryan was magic. He hoped it was the latter. Magic wasn't that uncommon, if you knew where to look. Oracles were one of a kind-- not a race, not a species, but a mantle passed down through generations, one Oracle at a time. If their location got out, if the wrong person or creature got ahold of them… well, Ryan had heard stories about what happened to Oracles who spoke a little too loudly about their powers. Some people had to know to get prophecies, but it still wasn't the sort of power you advertised.

            Also, if Father Merrin knew anything, Ryan had to wonder why a Catholic priest knew about magic at all.

            Ryan went through his morning classes in a haze. He was still distant and dreamy when he got to lunch, sitting between Spencer and Adam without saying a word to anyone. Spencer nudged his arm, but Ryan just looked down at his tray. Nothing they could discuss there. Spencer leaned into him, a sort of physical reassurement, then went back to talking with Hayley.

            “You got home safe last night?” Adam asked. Ryan hummed his assent without looking up. He wasn't about to have this conversation either, so he studied the peas on his tray.

            “Sorry if I was pushy,” Adam continued. “I just worry, you know. Didn't want you to get hurt.”

            “Mmm,” Ryan said. He ate without tasting, tentatively glanced around the room. He was a senior, so he could feasibly make his escape from the lunchroom without getting into trouble. Spencer was giving the two of them an odd look.

            “You know, guy your size,” Adam continued. “I mean, everyone metabolizes alcohol differently, but I couldn’t have known how fast it’d get out of your system.”

            Spencer was definitely looking at the two of them then, the look in his eyes sharp.

            “Look, Adam, I’ve got to go. Um, paper to finish. I’ll see you in bio,” Ryan said. He accidentally met Spencer’s gaze once more as he stood up, and he quickly turned away from the almost betrayed look of alarm on Spencer’s face. He left the hard plastic tray on the table, swung his bag over his shoulder and sped out of the lunch room, shoulders hunched over and moving so quickly and purposefully that no teacher told him to stop.

            It was not, Ryan decided, one of his better days. And since he had already skipped one period, he couldn’t quite justify missing biology to get out of seeing Adam. But for as chatty as he had been at lunch, Adam seemed to have finally picked up on Ryan’s mood, and said nothing to him all through their science class.

            Ryan should have said something to someone. He should have told Spencer something was wrong, he definitely should’ve told his dad that someone suspected him of being the Oracle, and yet he didn’t. Spencer was being curt enough with Ryan that the situation never arose where he could tell him something was wrong, and his dad just wasn’t there. So, when Spencer still hadn’t said more than a few niceties to Ryan by lunchtime the next day, things were getting out of hand.

            Ryan yanked Spencer out of his seat and into the bathroom, and after the door swung shut on them, he said:

            “Okay, get it out of your system.”

            “You got drunk with the new kid after band practice.”

            “I had **_A_** beer with Adam after Brendon pissed me off,” Ryan said. “It wasn’t like I ditched you to go get plastered at a strip club or something.” Technically he had had two, but that wasn't the point.

            “Since when do you drink?” Spencer demanded. Ryan really wished Spencer had been more up to confronting him about this earlier, say, in the car, rather than in the heavily graffitied bathroom that smelled somehow like piss and bleach at the same time.

            “We’ve had glasses of wine with your parents before,” Ryan said. “It’s not like it’s a big deal. And I didn’t want to be alone the other night, and you were busy with Brent and Brendon, so I called Adam. He’s nice.”

            “We weren’t ditching you,” Spencer said. “You know you were perfectly welcome to stay-”

            “I didn’t want that!” Ryan said. “We played pool, talked about biology, and I had one beer. It isn’t the end of the world.”

            Spencer looked him up and down.

            “I’m just worried,” he said.

            “Don’t,” Ryan said. He sighed. The red letters scribbled into the tile above Spencer’s head read “ _jackie is a slut_ ,” and the words by Ryan’s right hand said “ _high school is like Ecclesiastes 1:1_.” Catholic school.

            Once the silence had stretched out into a painfully awkward length of time, Ryan spoke up again.

            “Do we have to have a slumber party with the weirdos tonight?”

            “They’re not that weird,” Spencer said. “And yes.”

            “Awesome,” Ryan said sarcastically. “Fabulous. I’ll grab my shit after school then head to your house. Want a ride?”

            Spencer smiled at him. It was an endeared smile, the kind that said Ryan drove him crazy, but that all was forgiven.

            “Yeah,” he said. “Always.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> another kinda boring chapter, but I did it? Yay?


	6. Prophets and Followers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> More bonding with dream boy, and thoughts of the distant future.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning for fight club spoilers

            Brendon had never stayed the night at someone else’s house before. Or, if he had, he hadn’t done it enough to get good at it. He was buzzing with even more nervous energy than usual when he showed up, and he positively jumped when Ryan brushed up against him while they were crammed together on Spencer’s sofa, watching _Fight Club_.

            “That Marla chick is so hot,” Brent said. In terms of _Fight Club_ crushes, Ryan was more of a Brad Pitt kind of guy, but he was fairly certain that saying as much in front of the Mormon kid would give him a heart attack.

            “Shh,” Ryan said instead. “We’re getting to a good part.”

            “You think the whole thing is a good part,” Brent said.

            “I think it’s good,” Brendon piped up. “I like it. But why does she keep calling him Tyler?”

            Ryan and Spencer made eye contact. They had a full conversation while looking at each other, one that ended with Ryan nodding and saying

            “Brendon, have you ever seen this movie before?”

            “No,” he said, voice muffled by a mouth full of popcorn. He swallowed too fast, coughed, and looked at Ryan, eyes streaming. “Is that okay?”

            “Oh, I envy you,” Brent said. “I’ve seen this movie so many Goddamn-”

            “You don’t use the Lord’s name in vain, dickweed,” Ryan said, though from the look on Brent’s face, the sarcasm was lost on him. “Also, shut up, if he hasn’t seen it he’s gotta hear the whole thing.”

            Brendon paid rapt attention for a minute, then went back to leg bouncing, whispering questions out of the side of his mouth, and, to Ryan’s intense annoyance, humming quietly to himself.

            “Brendon,” Ryan sighed. The name tasted odd in his mouth, like he had tried to bite off too big a mouthful of food in saying it. He pushed away the strange, sudden sensation of electricity in his stomach, and focused in on his annoyance. “You’re, like, singing to yourself.”

            “Oh!” Brendon turned bright red, the sort of shade that didn’t make sense for a real person’s skin to turn. “Sorry. I didn’t realize I was doing it, but if you just let me know I can-”

            “It’s fine, shh,” Ryan said. He didn’t have to look up to see that Spencer was giving him a tired look.

            When Tyler and the narrator were revealed to be the same person, Brendon let out a cry of surprise so loud that it made Ryan's head throb. He clutched at his temples with his hands, annoyance shooting through him, and then he realized that this much pain hadn't come from Brendon's voice alone. His heartbeat pounded against the side of his skull like a hammer, and he could hear voices coming from the base of his spine, soft but getting louder every second.

“Bathroom,” Ryan said even as he stood. It was hard to see, like other lights and scenes were pressing into his vision, trying to overtake it.

            “Are you okay?” someone asked, but it sounded like they were shouting from very far away, almost like their voice was echoing off the sides of a canyon. Too loud and too quiet all at once.

            Ryan made a noise that wasn’t quite a word, nor was it distinguishably a yes or a no, and continued to stumble his way out of the room and down the hall to the bathroom. Lucky, he thought, that he knew the Smith house so well that he could literally find his way around blindfolded. He managed to fumble the door shut before pitching forward, his head clanging against the rim of the toilet as he fell to his knees.

            The world was staticky with snow, bitter wind biting at Ryan’s skin like wasps, and there was someone screaming. Everyone screaming. Ryan looked up, saw the dark shape of the clouds moving, forming into the head of a dog, and he opened his mouth to scream when-

            “Ryan? Are you okay in there?”

            Who the fuck asked that? At the bathroom door? Seconds after someone went inside? Ryan’s perplexion with Brendon was so much that it almost pulled him out of his own head, but then his front was warm with blood, the ground beneath him was pitching like a boat on storm tossed waters, and he could hear Brendon screaming, another Brendon.

            Ryan dragged himself till his head hung over the rim of the toilet and he vomited.

            “Ryan!”

            “Leave him alone, man.”

            Yes, _please_ , leave him alone. No one had to witness Ryan losing it completely. The thought was too embarrassing to consider for too long, and in any case. The rest of Ryan, the part of him that wasn’t on the bathroom floor was submerged in icy water, watching as the pale sun grew distant, further away, then further, then disappeared entirely.

            Ryan sat bolt upright, the vision over that fast, and at the same time, Brendon burst through the plywood door. Ryan flattened himself against the wall, blinking up at him in disbelief.

            “Din’t I lock’t?” Ryan slurred. He wiped bile off the side of his mouth. Brendon nodded. He had chewed his lip raw with worry, and images of missing, bloody mouths stained the inside of Ryan’s eyes. He shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts. Just Brendon. The thought was weirdly comforting, then annoying again.

            “Dude, did you break the door?” Spencer asked. Brendon looked distressed as he turned away from Ryan.

            “I-” he looked at the door, his face growing pale. “But, Ryan, he-”

            “He’s got a condition,” Spencer said, a little defensive, a little angry. “You broke the door down?”

            “But he was screaming!” Brendon insisted.

            Still seated, Ryan felt vulnerable and defensive, he was not screaming. Not here, anyway. He made a face at Spencer, now also visible in the doorway, and Spencer just looked confused. So Ryan was right. Spencer would’ve broken down the door before Brendon if he had been screaming. But the thing was... He was screaming. Just not here. Not now.

            Brendon looked pleading, but Ryan was already shaking his head.

            “Just sick, dude,” Ryan said, though he wouldn’t meet Brendon’s eyes. “It’s not that loud. Not as loud as trying to watch TV with you.”

            Spencer shot Ryan a typical “why are you being a dick?” look before sighing.

            “Don’t worry about it,” he said bracingly. “Ryan’s broken half the house at some point or another, they’re probably expecting to have to pay for some sort of damage around here. It’ll be fine.”

            Brendon, for his part, looked fucking miserable.

            “I heard you screaming,” he said, insistent now.

            “Nobody else did, dude,” Brent said. Ryan almost caught himself giving Brent a grateful look, but he stopped himself in time.

            “I’m just sick,” Ryan said.

            “Do you need to head home?” Spencer asked. His eyes were trained on Ryan, looking… disappointed. Ryan felt stung, because this wasn’t his fault. He turned his glare briefly on Brendon, who shied away from it like a floodlight.

            “Yeah, sure,” Ryan said. He leaned on the counter as he made his way out of the bathroom.

            “I was just asking!” Spencer said. “You can stay here if you want!”

            Ryan wanted to drive away for the sake of his pride, but he was pretty sure he wasn’t going to make it out of the bathroom, much less across town. Going wasn’t going to be an option, so he nodded.

            “Can I just… lay down in your room for a bit?” he tried to make a face at Spencer, to talk to him without words, like they always did, and convey that he needed help, needed Spencer. Spencer gave him a look, and Ryan wasn’t sure what it said, but it didn’t say “Sure man, I’ll be right in.”

            “Need a hand?” Spencer asked. And Ryan did, but he shook his head. He clung to the wall as he slowly made his way down the hall, and into Spencer’s room. He curled up on the bed with sheets that smelled like nice, name-brand detergent, and a duvet so heavy it was practically weighted that Ryan pulled over his head.

            Everything fell apart as soon as he stopped dreaming about the boy, and as soon as Brendon showed up in his life. Maybe they were the same person, but whoever, whatever this was, it was way less helpful in real life than in Ryan’s dreams.

 

            Ryan woke up to the smell of maple bacon and chocolate chip pancakes, a Smith house specialty. Mrs. Smith always cooked breakfast like she was prepping for a slumber party of roughly twenty girls, but Ryan adored her for the maternal instinct, and the sheer amount of chocolate chip pancakes. He could devour four servings worth without even feeling uncomfortably full. Ryan sat up, eager, only to be struck by a wave of loneliness. No one was in the room with him, of course, because he had fallen asleep in Spencer’s bedroom rather than the living room, with everyone else.

            Out in the kitchen, the others were already seated around the table, arguing spiritedly about Blink 182. Ryan slid silently into a chair, smiling vaguely up at Spencer’s mom as she set a plate down in front of him.

            “Are you feeling any better?” she asked, low enough that the boys couldn’t hear her. Ryan thought, not for the first time, how much he wished he were Spencer’s brother, and that he had some kind of claim on this place and this family. His parents were like Ryan’s parents, his home Ryan’s second home, but Ryan knew that those were just words. In reality, none of this was his. All the way down to the fact that Mrs. Smith knew something was wrong with Ryan, but it wasn’t as though he had told his best friend’s mom that he saw the future.

            “I am,” Ryan said. “Thanks.” he wished he could offer up more, some kind of explanation, but what could he say?

            “Didn’t hear Ryan screaming in his sleep, right?” Brent asked around a mouthful of pancakes. Brendon flushed, sinking deeper into his chair.

            “Sorry,” he said, and Spencer glared at Brent. Good. High time he started glaring at someone who wasn’t Ryan.

            “Did you need a ride home later today?” Ryan asked Brendon. Brendon nodded, an eager shine in his eyes. “Cool. Figured Brent wouldn’t want to do it, go out of his way for someone. You wouldn’t have tried to come in if I _was_ screaming bloody murder, right?”

            “Dick,” Brent said, shoving Ryan, but sort of smiling. Better. Ryan was good at fixing things.

            And, for Spencer’s sake, he played nice that day. He soundly kicked everyone’s ass playing video games for a few rounds, then retreated to a corner with a book. He didn’t insult Brendon’s religion, or rib him anymore than he would rib Brent. Even without eye contact, he could feel the approval coming from Spencer, which meant Ryan had done his job. By that afternoon, the disturbing vision from the night before was all but forgotten.

            Brendon sat in the passenger seat in dead silence for the first few minutes of the drive. He was scrunched up in the seat, making himself look tiny, somehow, even though he wasn’t that much shorter than Ryan. Eventually, Ryan caved and spoke first.

            “So, Fight Club. Awesome, right?”

            Ryan had forgotten how terrible he was at small talk. He hardly ever had to make it.

            “Huh? It was cool, yeah,” Brendon said.

            “The book is better,” Ryan said. “But I secretly kind of prefer the ending in the movie.”

            “How does the book end?” Brendon asked.

            “He tries to kill himself to kill Tyler and wakes up in the hospital with all of the guys from Project Mayhem there, promising to bring Tyler back,” Ryan said. “I like the movie, with him and Marla. Dark but not quite so… cynical.”

            “I would never have guessed,” Brendon said vehemently. Ryan snorted. It was still cool out, all desert wind and pale sunlight, but the car was warm, the kind of pleasant temperature that only lasted for a few months. Easy to appreciate, given how damn quiet Brendon was.

            “Can I ask you something?” Brendon asked eventually, and, with great restraint, Ryan didn’t tell him that he just had, and instead he nodded.

            “Did--” Brendon cut himself off, and frowned. He squirmed in his seat, and Ryan glanced over at him. He was biting his lip, looking kind of like he had to piss, or, more realistically, like he was holding something back.

            “Why did you name your car Matilda?” he asked at last. “Was it, like, your mom’s name or something?”

            “No?” Ryan said. “Why- why would I name my car after my mom?”

            “Oh! Sorry, I thought- well, I kind of thought she was dead.”

            “Man, I wish,” Ryan laughed without any humor. Brendon didn’t say anything, and Ryan had pulled onto the interstate, so he couldn’t see the poor kid’s face. “I named her Matilda like the kid’s book. By Roald Dahl, you know. The girl who loved reading and got telekinesis because her parents wouldn’t give her, like, intellectual stimulation? It was my favorite book when I was a kid, and then when I grew up I realized that Roald Dahl was _basically_ baby’s first Chuck Palahniuk, so… Matilda.”

            “I’ve never heard of it,” Brendon said. Ryan threw a glance his way.

            “Are there any books you have heard of?” he asked.

            “Besides the obvious, you know, _Book of_...?” Brendon said, and Ryan surprised himself by laughing. Maybe Brendon had a better sense of humor than it seemed.

            “I feel like we probably don’t have very similar taste in books,” Brendon continued at last.

            “Okay,” Ryan said. “Fair enough.” He was quiet, would have, maybe should have let the conversation drop there, but he didn’t. He wanted, for some unfathomable reason, to keep talking to Brendon.

            “But you liked Fight Club,” Ryan said. “So… would you want to borrow my copy of the book?”

            “Sure!” Brendon all but shouted. Ryan very determinedly didn’t flinch away from the loud noise.

            Well. Spencer couldn’t complain. And it would certainly give Brendon and Ryan something to talk about.

            After he dropped Brendon off, all Ryan wanted was to get back home, to veg out and get absolutely nothing done, but as usual, he pulled up to the sight of another car in the driveway. Strangers seeking fortunes, as fucking always.

            Ryan had half a mind to tell them to go away, make up some bullshit excuse about homework or sleep or a non-existent girlfriend, but as he got out of the car, he caught sight of the man in the driver’s seat of the car already there.

            A man who looked suspiciously like Mark Hoppus.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> any throam reference in the title is.... beyond unintentional. Anyway, shorter chapter than usual but the ending felt natural. Thanks for reading!

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks so much for reading! For more on this universe, check out http://thehigh-waytohell.tumblr.com


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